Have you ever wondered how long poker chips have been around? Where they came from? Why some venues choose to order chips without stripes down the sides so updates teams around the globe have trouble getting counts by eye from afar?
We wondered those things. A quick google search led us to this article.
If you'd rather skip reading the article, we'll give you the cliff notes...
Though there is evidence of legal casinos in modern Italy dating back to the early 1600s, poker chips as we know them today didn't really come about until the late 19th century. Before that, people used any small valuable object to wager with such as gold nuggets, silver pieces, or paper money.
In the second half of the 19th century gambling houses and saloons began having their own "chips" made out of materials like ivory or bone. In the late 1880s, companies started to use compression molds to design clay chips of a standard size.
Somewhere along the way, the gamblers learned how to forge the simple chip designs so the manufacturers began branding them.
So, poker chips have evolved from hand-carved pieces of bone to the modern clay and ceramic chips that we know today in the last 150 years. Who knew!
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