Casino chips

6 October 2018

By John Marchel

Casino chips (also known as casino or gaming tokens, checks or cheques) are small discs used in lieu of legal currency in casinos. Injection-molded plastic or compression-molded clay tokens of various denominations are used primarily in table games today, as opposed to metal coins, used primarily in slot machines.

The manufacture of casino chips today includes some percentage of earthen material such as sand, chalk and clay, similar to that found in cat litter.

Money can be exchanged for chips in a casino at the casino cage, the gaming tables, or at a cashier station. The chips than become interchangeable with money in the casino area. They generally have no value outside of the gaming area, but certain other places such as restaurants, bars and taxis — especially for tips, in gambling towns will usually honor them.

At one time at the Baden-Baden Casino in Germany, real silver and gold chips were used while gambling in the casino.

Ever wonder why dollar chips are usually white and five-dollar ones are red? In 1832 Edward Pendleton open a gambling house called “The Palace of Fortune” on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington D.C. Those were the colors he used for his chips and they remain the same colors used today by card rooms and casinos.

Secure, relatively high-yielding stocks came to be called “blue chips,” a term taken from the game of poker, where blue chips were more valuable than white or red chips. A multi-million-dollar fraud was pulled off some years ago because of chip colors.

Counterfeiters brought thousands of $1 chips from a Reno casino that was identical in color and makings of a $25 chips at a major Las Vegas casino. New $25 paper inserts were made and pasted over the $1 chips. Sometime later one chip didn’t get glued correctly and the fraud was discovered. What is a casino chip really worth? A $1 chip from the late 1930s gambling ship off the California coast, the S.S. Rex, is worth almost $400 today!

BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW

• Because eight (verves 7) is considered a lucky number in Chinese culture, chips denominated with 8, 88, and 888 are common in casinos catering to Chinese clientele.

• Several casinos in Las Vegas, and in some other areas around the country, have issued “limited edition” varied-designed chips from time to time, commemorating various events. This encourages customers to keep them for souvenirs, at a nice profit for the casino.

• When baccarat was first introduced into the US in Las Vegas, cash in lieu of chips was used for wagering. Because $20 bills exist in U.S. currency that was the minimum wager at the table, rather then $25, which is the normal value chip in a casino.

• The gambling chips used in European countries are called “jetton” and most of chips come in differed sizes depending on the denominations. In the US casinos all chips are the same size.

• Golden Goose casino in Las Vegas opened in 1975 and closed in 1980. When one of its $5 chip showed up in the mid-1990s it went of over $3,000 at auction.

• In Las Vegas, the Wynn and Bellagio casinos have $100,000 denomination chips, while Caesars Palace, MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay have chips that have a top value of $25,000.

• It was around the 1880s that clay and shellac composition began to replace the expensive bone and ivory chips found in saloons and private gambling games.

• In the U.K. casino chips are known by different names than the chips in US casinos. In London casinos £1 chips are referred to as “singles,” £5 chips are called “reds”, £25 are “blacks” and £100 chips are called “pinks.”

• In Las Vegas a chip tray in a high limit table will be stacked with as much as $1.5 million chips on a weekend, a little less on week days.

• President Harry Truman loved to play poker. When he became a regular visitor to Key West, the Navy shops at the base built him a poker table and stocked it with poker chips that had the Seal of the President of The United States on them.