While playing poker an old saying is often repeated. It goes something like, "the man who invented gambling was a smart man, but the man who invented poker chips was a genius." When you really think about this it becomes obvious why this is very true. While having the same value, people have different views of poker chips.
While varying items of value have been used in gambling for many hundreds of years, actual poker chips did not really show up until the 1800's. As with many things, there is no "AHA!" moment where the very first poker chip was created and then gambled away. Chips were made from substances like wood, ivory, bone, and eventually a composite of clay materials.
From the late 1800's and into the early 1900's, clay poker chips become the norm. Just a handful of companies in the USA emerged to become the source of these chips. The name that most people associate with clay poker chips is Paulson. Paulson continues to make chips and is the current market leader for casino poker chips, supplying casinos worldwide. There are currently several other clay poker chip manufacturers, including companies outside the USA.
In the late 1900's a new ceramic poker chip was introduced to the market. The benefits of these chips is that they provided full customization. The entire face on both sides of the chips can be customized with full color images. Also, the edges can be customized with regular stripes, diagonal stripes, text, or anything else you can think up. Ceramic poker chips are currently used in dozens of casinos worldwide.
Back to the old saying about the inventor of the poker chip. How is that guy a "genius"? When gambling, if someone can push a pile of chips into a pot or towards a dealer it does not have the same "feeling" as pushing a stack of cash. Since the chips themselves are worth close to nothing relative to the value they represent, it can be easy to push around piles of poker chips without really thinking about what they are truly worth.
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