If you want an authentic casino feeling, an accessory that could boost the atmosphere are quality casino chips. They come with different types of material and finish, but the shape and the size are somewhat universal.

Ultra-cheap plastic tokens won't satisfy the design or quality, and casino-grade clay chips might be expensive for casual gamers at home. To better understand which casino chip to choose, we will look into how they make them, the difference between supermarket chip packages and tokens you can find in traditional casinos. One place that doesn't have to worry about physical chips is a Canadian online casino, but you can see exciting designs on those websites.

How are they made

The main divide between casino chips is amateur and professional. The cheapest low-end chips in the amateur category cost around one cent per chip, as they are injection moulded using cheap plastic. You can find nice-looking chips in the amateur range for around 30 cents. But, it would help if you considered casino grade chips for the natural feel of a home casino, and they divide them into two main methods. The absolute high-end chips have a particular name; clay, although, for over 70 years, clay is not the main ingredient. Second to clay are ceramic, and they are also called clay composite.

Clay casino chips

The clay chips are compression moulded chips, and they are a composition of materials of better endurance than clay. Some percentage of the chips use sand for construction, chalk, or even clay. The companies that produce most chips are Gaming Partners International, Matsui, GTI Gaming, and Abbiati. The actual process is a trade secret, and we suspect it to be expensive and time-consuming. They get different colours on the chip by removing part of the clay and inserting it from a separate chip. They don't get any paint on them. In the end, they insert the chips into a mould that compresses the chunk. The graphics on the tokens are called inlay, which is paper applied to the chip via plastic film before the compression.

The real casino chips can withstand pressure up to 10,000 psi and temperatures up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. If you consider thousands of people that use chips every day, no wonder they should endure extreme conditions. The production could be more expensive, but ultimately they will last longer.

Ceramic chips

In the 1980s came the alternative to clay chips called ceramic. The name is misleading because these are injection-moulded chips made with a special plastic to mimic the feel of ceramic. There is a wide variety of forms, plastic and plastic-covered metal slugs. Ceramic chips are less prone to degradation and are cheaper to produce.

Casinos use various methods to improve the security of their tokens. Some chips come with serial numbers, RFID tags, or another type of security. The chips weigh somewhere between 8.5 and 10.6 grams. The most common colours used in chip production are red, white, blue, green and black. Plastic chips have more variety of colours, and there is no actual rule about the colour scheme.