Ashley Adams has been playing poker for 50 years and writing about it since 2000. He is the author of hundreds of articles as well as Winning 7-Card Stud (Kensington 2003). It’s fair to say he knows a thing or two about poker, live poker especially. We asked Adams to give our readers an insight into the various poker chip sets you can buy for your poker home game, and he duly obliged
This article was originally written by Ashley Adams in August 2016. Last update: February 2023.
An age-old saying goes like this: “The guy who invented gambling was brilliant, but the guy who invented chips was a genius.”
The reason behind this saying is that chips remove from gambling the real world of money. Gamblers tend to have short memories. Once they purchase chips, they quickly forget their real-world value, making losses on the green felt seem relatively painless — at least until they go to cash out.
Home poker has largely embraced this concept. Games that used to be played with silver change and paper money are now often played with the best poker chips. If you’re hosting a home game, you may well be considering the purchase of a cool poker chip set.
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The best poker chip sets contain:
- A set of 500 poker chips
- Poker chips in three or four colors for different denominations
- A deal button
- A Big Blind button
- A Small Blind button
- Two decks of French cards
A poker chip set for the home like this should be enough for your typical game of one to two tables. Finding the best poker chips for home games depends on your tastes and budget.
Here’s a summary of what’s out there to help you find the perfect chips for your game. To get a good sense of your options, I suggest you check out the online stores specializing in poker supplies.
Cheap Poker Chips: Plastic Chips
At the very lowest end of the chip market are the very lightweight, 2-gram or so, thin plastic poker chips that many of us played with as kids or in high school and college. They are typically sold in packs of 100, often in red, white, and blue.
These chips are available in nearly every large pharmacy and grocery store, usually in the same area where they sell packs of playing cards. They’ll cost you $2.50 to $3.95 or so. If you look around, you might find them in the dollar stores, but they will be low-quality.
You can buy plastic poker chips online, too. In these cases, these are your best options:
These cheap plastic poker chips are acceptable in a pinch or with young or inexperienced players who have never been to a public poker room or casino. But they feel and sound so much cheaper than you find in a casino or poker room that they may be inadequate for your more serious players.
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Imitation Clay Poker Chips
One step up, and what I first purchased in the early ’90s when I started playing in casinos around the United States, are solidly colored, imitation clay poker chips.
These poker chips for home games are made of heavy plastic weighing 8 grams a chip or so. Excellent imitation clay poker chips for home games are often marketed as “super diamond chips.” They can be purchased online for between $.06 and $.10 per chip and sell in “sleeves” of 25 single-color chips.
These are the best poker chips of this kind:
These imitation clay poker chips are perfect for your home game, especially if you are running multi-table tournaments and want to afford a lot of chips for relatively little money. Since they lack any striping, spotting, or design, some players might not prefer them. But I’ve used mine in large tournaments and home games for 25 years and never had a complaint (at least not to my face).
Clay Composite Chips
Slightly more expensive, and by far the most common chips sold to poker players today, are the metal-filled, clay composite chips, with many different designs, strips, and spots. Clay poker chips are usually sold as part of a chip set, including an inexpensive aluminum carrying case.
These can also be purchased in sleeves of 25 from some companies but are typically sold in units of 500 or 1,000 as part of a poker chip set for home games. These clay composite chips come in an extensive range of prices.
The 500-chip sets, for example, can be purchased online for anywhere from $39 or so up to $300 (not including shipping), based on the chip’s quality, design, and weight. Each chip weighs anywhere from 11 to 14 grams.
Pick one of these if you are looking for the best poker chips and want a top chip set for home games. You can’t go wrong with any of them.
I’ve noticed that the clay composite chips tend to be of unacceptably poor quality at the very bottom of that price range.
I once purchased a 1,000-chip set for $90 and paid $45 to ship them (they’re heavy, and shipping is generally expensive). The chips arrived with 20 red chips equaling the height of only 19 white chips. They had many other defects in them as well. I had to send them back for a refund — and got stuck with one way of the shipping costs.
If you are ordering these metal-filled chips, I recommend you order no cheaper chip than the ones selling for about $150 for 1,000.
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Customized Ceramic Poker Chips
The next step up is the Ceramic poker chips that sell for about $.40-$.75 or so each.
Nevada Jacks is the most popular brand of these chips. These also come in sets of 500 or 1,000.
An excellent ceramic poker set of the best home poker chips are known for their brilliant colors and sharp detail. These are the best poker chips to buy. They are not metal filled and don’t make the metal clanging sound when they bump together. Players rave about them.
The most expensive, regularly produced variety of chips are the casino-quality clay chips made by the Paulson company, typified by the Top Hat and Cane design. These chips cost roughly $1.25 a chip, or from $1,100 to $1,400 for a set of 1,000.
If you want your home poker chips to be like those in a casino and don’t mind paying for them, these are for you. The best ceramic poker chips for home games are:
There is another option to consider. Some chip manufacturers will customize your chips with your design. These can come as a “hot stamped” imprint, as a printed label that is permanently affixed to the chip, or in the case of ceramic chips, the design can be built into the chip itself. Prices for this option vary widely, so shop around if this interests you.
Poker Chip Cases
Remember, you’ll want a case to store and transport your poker chip set. There are a few options in this department as well.
The most common are these thin aluminium or vinyl attaché cases.
These are most frequently made with room for 500 chips and a few extra spaces for cards. Chip cases also accommodate 250, 350, 750, and 1,000 chips.
They sell for between $20-$50 and can vary some in quality, though it’s usually next to impossible to tell from the pictures which ones are more sturdily made. Look for reinforcements in the corners.
Also, the 1,000 capacity chip case, when filled with chips, will be too heavy for some to carry around easily.
You might be better off ordering two 500s instead. There is also a 2,000-chip case that comes with wheels for easier transportation. If you run tournaments or move your game from place to place, you might be tempted to get it, but I don’t recommend it. From everything I’ve read and heard, it is not built with sufficient sturdiness to survive much use. Tales of handles and wheels falling off upon first use are a legend.
There are a few other chip case options. One is a clear lucite chip case. It is built for 1,000 chips, stacked in chip racks of 100 each, and sells for about $50.
This is very useful if you run tournaments and want to quickly have your chips organized for simple distribution to a large group of people.
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It’s also incredibly sturdy, easy to stack, and doesn’t dent, scratch, or deteriorate from regular use (unlike the aluminum and vinyl cases described above). It’s what I use, and I highly recommend it.
Finally, for those who care about how your chip cases look, there are some charming wooden storage boxes. They tend to be cube-shaped, come in a dark finish, and have shiny, small metal handles, one on each side of the box.
They aren’t easy to carry, so it would be awkward and inappropriate if you transported your chips regularly. But they do look nice sitting on a shelf. They sell for about $50 separately, but like all other chip cases, they are often included in the price of a chip set.
Other Recommendations
I would immediately rule out the cheap plastic poker chips and the cheapest metal-filled chips. Beyond that, however, there isn’t much difference in how your poker-playing guests will react to the chips.
I’ve played in home games with the best ceramic poker chips, and with Paulson’s. They were beautiful to hold. But while I noticed the quality, no one else seemed to care. I’ve found that poker players are typically so completely engaged in how much they are up or down that the look of their chips is the last thing they care about.
That being said, you might care about that and might take great pride in having a stunning set of chips that remind you of those you play with at a casino. One last item to consider is that only a few brick-and-mortar stores sell a wide variety of poker chips (The Gambler’s General Store in Las Vegas is a great exception).
Amazon, Target, Walmart, and a few other retail chains may have boxed sets for sale, but the chips themselves will still be hidden. That means, for the most part, you’ll probably be looking online at an image of a chip — not the real thing — when you contemplate a purchase.
Therefore, I recommend that before you buy a complete set of chips, especially an expensive one, you either purchase or ask the company to send you some sample chips for free. Catalogs, computer screens, and the like don’t do a chip justice. You’ll need to see, hold, and use the chip itself. Sure, it may cost you $5 or $10 to get a small sample set of chips from the manufacturer. But that’s a much less costly option than ordering chips you don’t want and having to return them.
Photos: “Ready for poker,” Laura,
CC BY 2.0; “Poker Chips,” Indi Samarajiva,
CC BY 2.0; “Poker XII,” Bastian Greshake, CC BY-SA 2.0; “New custom ceramic chip set,” BigMikeSndTch, CC BY 2.0; “Poker anyone?” uzi978, CC BY-SA 2.0;.