Chronicle of poker chips

Poker is regarded as one of the most loved games of all times. During 1800s when poker was peaking all over the world, there arose a need to keep an account of the amount won or lost by an individual. People started experimenting with versatile materials like wood, bones and resources of all sorts until they came upon with noble thought of using gold and precious metal pellets to keep an account of winning and losing.

Thus started a new era of poker with a new set of currency and the first poker chips came into existence in the form of gold and silver pellets. With time, some other products like gems, precious ores and minerals were also being used as makeshift poker chips. Soon hard to grow crops and exotic items were added to this ever growing list of poker chip materials.

As an aftermath, a large number of materials were being merchandised and used by people as crude poker chips. This resulted in disarray on several occasions, as there were no means to match two dissimilar products on the basis of their efficaciousness. Ultimately, there was a rigorous need for standardization of poker chips to steer clear of any more confusion.

By the late 1800s, clay chips were introduced into the poker arena and they earned instant popularity. These modern chips were a great substitute to people carrying vast amount of cash.  All the same, clay chips were expensive as well as less durable. The poker industry found different ways to tackle this problem too. In 1930’s the chips were produced with metal foil casing to enhance the durability and heighten the security. During the 1940’s, the nearly all the casinos started having customized poker chips with their unparalleled colorful custom designs and   unique logo printed on them.

With some more technical progression, revolutionary materials such as plastic and acrylic were introduced. Plastic and acrylic poker chips flooded the market due to their cheap and durable characteristics and therefore soon became the standard poker chips. These inexpensive chips offered a grotesque substitute however; there was another hiccup in the path. With the mass production, counterfeits and imitations too surfaced along with original ones. To deal with this problem, casinos came up with another brilliant idea of embedding microchips. Thus, each casino had their custom-made chips engrafted with their own microchip and the fake chips were easily distinguished due to their texture, delineated weight and make.

Companies these days have a capacity to mass-produce poker chips beyond our vision. A set of poker chips these days can be bought from these creditable companies at a trifle of a value what they used to charge earlier. The credit goes to the technological progress and globalization that has lead to poker gaining monumental acknowledgement and far-flung recognition.