Real casino poker chips
Casino POKER Chip Color Values: Common Denominations + Info
When you sit down for some poker action at a brick-and-mortar casino, or even in a home game with friends, you'll likely use poker chips with values by color rather than dollar bills and coins. Because they're a uniform size and shape, these casino chips make it easy to bet, call, and raise without fumbling around. The common denominations of casino chips have the same colorings at most live cardrooms although you will find some variation from place to place.
You can learn all about standard casino chip colors by continuing to read our breakdown of poker chip color values. Then you'll understand both the systems in place for casino poker games as well as reasonable chip values for home poker.
Familiar, Everyday Chip Colors
As you might expect, the most prevalent chip colors tend to also be the less-pricey ones. These standard Vegas chip colors are probably the tokens you'll be dealing with at least until you graduate to playing against Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Daniel “Jungleman” Cates and their ilk.
It doesn't matter whether you're playing at the Bellagio, Caesar's Palace, Aria, Wynn or some other casino establishment because there are certain commonalities in their casino chip colors.
From Excalibur in LV
$1 White Chip
The lowest-value chip in mainstream circulation, it's no surprise that this one is white, the simplest color. You'll see these used in low-stakes poker games. Light blue is a variant color that represents $1 at some casinos. Even when playing a bigger game, it's pretty useful to keep a few white chips around so that you can easily tip the dealer or cocktail waitress.
From Hilton in AC
$2.50 Pink Chip
You'll probably encounter these chips floating around the casino, but there might not be any poker tables in the establishment that use them. Their most common application is at the blackjack tables when someone gets a natural 21 and thus earns a 3:2 reward. People who bet $15 will receive $22.50, and a $25 wager earns a $37.50 payout, so there is a reason that pink is one of the standard casino chip colors.
From Bellagio in LV
$5 Red Chip
A staple of casinos and home games everywhere, the poker chip with a value of $5 is almost always red. A rack of red is thus $500, more than enough to buy in and reload a couple of times at a $1/$2 No Limit or $4/$8 Limit table. We have heard of mythical $50 red chips in use before, but have never once seen an example of them!
From Caesar's Palace in LV
$25 Green Chip
It's pretty rare to find any other color besides green for the $25 chip in a casino setting, but some cheap poker sets for home use have only have white, red, and blue chips, so they need to establish a different regime of poker chip color value. By tradition, the blue chip is the highest-value one, so it is sometimes worth $25. This is where the expression “blue-chip stock” came from.
From Foxwoods in CT
$100 Black Chip
If you're fortunate enough to amass a stack of black chips, then you probably had a good evening at the tables – or you're playing for pretty sizeable stakes. Pretty much everyone knows that a black casino token is worth $100 despite the fact that there are a few gambling houses that use white $100 chips instead.
Unusual Chip Colors
There are many other non-standard chip colors to be found especially for low values, like $2, $3, $10, and even a few sub-dollar amounts. Their hues vary greatly except that blue $10 chips are fairly common. At the other end of the spectrum, there are high-denomination chips that most regular players are unlikely to ever use. There are plenty of differences in their coloration too, but the following seem to be somewhat standard:
From Paris Casino in LV
- $500 - purple
- $1,000 - yellow or orange
- $5,000 - brown or gray
As we go beyond the $5,000 level, the poker chips value is basically up to the discretion of casino management. High-end casinos, like the Aria and Bellagio in Las Vegas, even have high-value casino chips worth $100,000 apiece. They are usually used in exclusive baccarat games.
Casino Plaques
As the stakes climb into the stratosphere, some participants don't want to have to deal with mountains of chips. With the introduction of the casino plaque, gaming managers hit upon a solution.
These plaques are rectangular and about the size of a playing card. Casino plaques are a mainstay of some of the top European and Asian casinos, but they have appeared in North America on occasion. The now-shuttered London Club at the Aladdin in Vegas actually created a plaque with a face value of $10,000,000.
Chip Construction
While professional-grade casino tokens are often referred to as “clay” chips, they actually contain other ingredients too to make them more durable. Once the mixture of differently colored substances for the poker chip denomination in question is arranged appropriately, the chip is heated up and pressurized.
Any printed graphics and text that appear on the token are applied prior to the pressurization process. This makes them stick to the chip so that they can't be illicitly altered or replaced later on.
Each casino orders its own branded chips with distinct features so that the possibility of counterfeiting is reduced. Some even go so far as to embed RFID tags into their chips. Most chips are around 10 grams in weight.
Tournament Chips
From Sahara in LV
When you watch a major live tournament on TV, like the World Series of Poker Main Event, you may see people with millions of poker chip value in front of them. It's important that you realize that these chips are basically just for playing purposes and don't correspond to their face value in actual dollars. They're almost always distinct from the regular casino chips used for other games, and they tend to be of poorer quality.
Chip Collections
There are countless styles of chip for pretty much every denomination, and those depicted above are just typical representations of what you're likely to encounter for casino chip colors. If you wish to take a look through other poker chip colors and values from various venues around the world, then check out our photos of chip collections below. Click on a thumbnail to bring up the full-sized image in a new browser tab.
17837 | 17838 | 17839 | 17840 | 17841 | 17842 | 17843 | 17844 | 17845 | 17846