Casino chips or tokens, checks or cheques are small discs used in place of cash in casinos. These are made of either colored metal, compression molded clay or injection molded plastic. They are of a variety of denominations and used at gaming tables at casinos instead of old metal coins, particularly at slot machines. In casual or poker tournaments, these chips are used as play money.

For high stakes games on Full Tilt, casinos sometimes use gaming plaques. Their value stands at $25,000 and above. Plaques are different from chips in three ways—they are larger in size, of oblong shape and come with serial numbers. Chips exchanged inside the casino have no value outside. In North American casinos, the chips used these days weigh between 8 grams and 10.5 grams and are called slugs for their weight.

Why chips are used: Chips are used because:

· They offer more convenience of use to the player than currency.

· They cannot be stolen or counterfeited.

· They are easier to count in a stack due to their sameness of size, shape and pattern. Paper currency is comparatively difficult to count quickly and verify.

· Since casino chips are of a uniform weight, they are easily stackable, and so do not need to be counted. Also, they are an encouragement to players who find that playing with chips is much better than playing with actual hard cash.

· Chips are part of the entire FullTilt Poker.net casino ambiance and so replacing them with currency would dilute its popularity.

No longer do casinos use metal coins and tokens to work their slot machines, but have now moved on to using prepaid cards or paper receipts. Though they demand high costs for installing infrastructure, they also do away with the costs of coin handling, and problems such as jamming of coins and tokens.

Some popular casinos such as Las Vegas’s Hard Rock Hotel installed the receipt system but still kept $1 tokens to be used as $1 chips. Other casinos that used receipts did away with tokens entirely. Casinos using receipts come with automated machines where customers exchange receipts. This does away with the need for coin counting cashiers and reduces casino staff.

Colors: Home sets of chips are usually in white, red, blue, green and black. Additionally, you can also get orange, yellow, purple, pink and grey. These days, chip sets are customized to the buyer’s needs and are made with fewer traditional colors and more colors used variously. Non-traditional colors are given high values such as $500, $1000, $5000, etc., and are especially used in tournaments or as in-between and unspecified values such as $.50 or $2, which are necessary for low-limit games.

The values of commonly used chips are as follows:

Blue: $10; Green: $25 and Black: $100. Full poker chip colors and their standard denominations are:

White: $1; Yellow: $2; Red: $5; Blue: $10; Grey: $20; Green: $25; Orange: $50; Black: $100; Pink: $250;

Purple: $500; Burgundy: $1000; Light Blue: $2000 and Brown: $5000.