They can be large or small, thick or thin, plastic or clay or some combination of materials. In Europe, theyre sometimes even square. But the question is: Why do we use poker chips anyway?

Casinos use chips in their gambling games for one simple reason. To make you forget that youre gambling with real money. Casinos know that its much easier for you to toss a few more chips onto the roulette wheel then to pull a twenty dollar bill out of your wallet, think about all the real things you could buy with it and hand it over to a dealer. Professional poker players often find this to be an advantage, as it both helps them treat the chips as a tool of their trade and not think about their cash value and it helps tourists forget about how much theyre actually losing until its way too late. For the casual player, it has some other purposes as well.

For one thing, chips are convenient. Its a lot easier to count out and push forth a stack of chips than to fumble with a bunch of bills and coins (its kind of hard to shuffle bills too). Its also much easier to tell how much your opponents have in front of them and how much they are betting, information it is crucial for you to have.

In a poker tournament, chips are more than convenient, theyre an absolute necessity. The reason for this is that in a poker tournament, the amount of money each player starts with is fixed, that is to say, everyone starts with the same amount and whoever ends up with all of them at the end wins (some tournaments allow you to buy additional chips, but only for a predetermined period of time). Without a standard unit of play such as a poker chip, players could sneak money into their stack at any time without anyone knowing, creating an unfair advantage for those players.

What do you need to know about poker chips? Well, if you are having regular games at home, you should invest in personalized chips. This will make it easy to keep track of them, which you will appreciate at the end of the night when you arent faced with a situation where you have more chips being handed to you than dollars to exchange them for. You should also try to get a ceramic clay blend for your chips. Pure clay chips tend to break and plastic ones just arent that much fun to play with. What you need to know about chips in the casino is that as much as they look like just shiny, pretty tokens, they really do represent money and should be treated accordingly. Also, dont forget to cash them all out at the end of the night! Although inside the casino chips are often treated as cash when buying things like drinks and food or giving tips, they wont help you much at the gas station on the way home!