After quite a lengthy break from any live poker action, I was happy to finally join a game last week, and that inspired me to write this article. I am sure many of you are eagerly waiting for the return of live games, so if you decide to organize your own, remember that having the right poker chips set is an important component to consider.

1. Real Clay Poker Chip Sets
2. Best China Clay Poker Chips
3. Best Poker Chip Sets

The reason I am specifically mentioning this is because that home game that I mentioned was carried out with cheap plastic chips and unfortunately had some misunderstandings along the way, so I want to make sure you can avoid them in your games. Without further ado, here are three things you need to consider when choosing your poker chips.

Quality

These days you can get all kinds of poker chips from plastic ones to ceramic and even custom made options to really shine in your games.

Clay chips are made using a compression molding process where unique designs can be molded right into the chip. These are the easiest chips to stack, handle and do chip tricks with. Contrary to the popular belief, the heaviest chips are not the best quality ones. The clay casino chips usually weight 8 to 9 grams. Weight img source: casino.org.

Real Clay Poker Chip Sets

The next product that we will be analyzing is the Smartxchoices 500 Poker Chip Set Clay Casino Poker Chips with an Aluminum Case.This product is extremely popular with customers because it features a high quality collection of poker chips that come with complimentary decks of cards and other gaming accessories that can be used for large amounts of fun. Get the best deals on Clay Poker Chips when you shop the largest online selection at eBay.com. Free shipping on many items. Bee Poker Chips 2 Boxes of 100 Engraved Red Ivory Blue Casino Quality. 5 out of 5 stars (1) Total Ratings 1, $4.99 New. Full Poker Clay Chip Set 12 grams Aluminum Metal Carry Case. $40.75 shipping. Each order comes with 25pcs of 13 gram Outlaw poker chips. These poker chips are made of high quality clay material with a metal insert for added professional weight and size. The chips are perfectly balanced and have the look and feel of real casino chips.

Well, for the sake of this article, let’s remove those custom chips from the equation since they tend to be relatively expensive, and most players will not usually consider this option. However, if you have some cash to spare on a premium look and feel, they can surely make your home games even more unique.

So you are basically left with plastic chips and a bit more expensive ceramic/clay option. Without even going into the details, I would never opt to have plastic ones in my games. It reduces the pleasure of playing, and these days you can easily find very inexpensive ceramic options, so there is no reason to go for the cheaper alternative.

Now, if you want to stick with ceramic chips as I would suggest, you also have a couple of options, and this mostly fluctuates based on the weight of individual chips. The standard and most common version are 11.5 gram chips, and these are good to start, but if you really want to get that premium quality, then you should go for 13.5g or 14g chips.

These are as good as the real ones used in the casino. To be honest, they are likely to be identical to those custom chips you can buy with the only difference being the picture engraved on the actual chip.

So whatever you are playing, I would suggest going for ceramic chips, and if you can, upgrade that to a 13.5-gram option to have a unique casino experience at your own home.

Denominations

Another thing that you need to consider is if you need blank poker chips or ones with poker chip values denominations indicated. While there is no clear answer that will suit everyone, I do think that we can divide these options based on the poker games you are going to play.

For cash games, I would opt to have chips with numbered values. Since blinds will not be changing too often, this will help to avoid any misunderstandings, especially if you have new players coming into your games. And even if not, it just can’t hurt you in any way, so it can make the game a bit smoother to run and leave your mental capacity for more important tasks.

Now, if you are playing MTTs, this is a different story. Using blank chips can offer you a lot of freedom since you can change the value of those colors much more easily as you progress through the tournament and have to increase the blinds. This way, you will never run out of chips.

While any chips will work for both cash games and tournaments, if you know you will only play one of these formats, choosing accordingly can be a wise decision.

Mobility

Last but not least, you have to consider how often you will be traveling with your chips. If you know that you are only going to use them at your own home, then you can go with whatever you like. However, if you plan to move around (e.g., you’ll be the one bringing the chips to a rotating home game), then a solid chip case is a must.

Unfortunately, that can become problematic with cheaper options since manufactures try to cut their costs wherever possible, and most of these standard cases are not very durable, to say the least. I suggest that you research your options and buy a more expensive and better case.

Plus, you can also just reduce the number of chips you are carrying around. Ceramic poker chips can be quite weighty, and if you get a set with 1000 pieces, your chip case will seriously be put to the test. Luckily, for most games, you can easily get away with the standard 500 chips set, or even a 300-piece set sometimes, so there is no need to get more than you actually use.

While many players do not consider this aspect, having your case fall apart is really unpleasant and makes carrying these chips around a real pain.

So if you want to avoid any trouble and pick the best option for your home games, just get ceramic chips, choose denominations based on your game and make sure not to be too thrifty when it comes to the chip case. After that, just enjoy and have fun in your games!

Other Posts You'll Enjoy

• Poker Rooms Should Start Spreading Wild Card Games

  We at Cardplayer Lifestyle think it's high time some innovations be made in live poker rooms, namely the introduction of wild card poker games. Check…

• 3 Crucial Poker Tips You Cannot Afford to Forget When Starting Out

  There's seemingly an endless supply of solid poker tips these days, but some of them are so critical that you'll quite literally cost yourself a…

• 5 Things You Should NOT Do in Live Poker Games

  There are plenty of things you need to keep in mind when playing live poker, but specifically there are a number of things you simply…

• 5 Home Game Poker Variants Guaranteed to Generate Lots of Action

  Everyone who has ever played a hand of poker understands the importance of the game having good action. Hold'em games are notorious for trying one's…

• Here's Why Your Friend Is Being a Nit in Your Home Poker Game

  When you think of a home game, you often think of a fun, rowdy crowd of friends enjoying themselves around the poker table. Tight nits…

• Rattling the Cage: Poker Tournaments Where Chips = Cash

  Have you ever been the chipleader in a tournament and wished you could just cash out right then and there, but end up missing out…

You will find that clay chips stack better than composite poker chips, beacause they are less slippery. The chips with graphics have a label inlay on them. These label inlays are recessed into the face of the chip, unlike ceramic poker chips, which the graphics are part of the chip.

All clay poker chips have some percentage of composite materials in them. The composite materials give the chip strength. A 100% pure clay chip would be extremely brittle and easy to break. Even our casino grade poker chips which have a higher percentage of clay can be broken in half, if you try to break them.

Generally, the more expensive a clay chip costs, the higher the percentage of clay it is made with. It is more complex to manufacturer chips with a higher clay content.

Weight has nothing to do with quality. Our highest quality chips are the 10 gram chips. The weight of a chip is is purely personal preference. Our most popular chips are the heavier 14 gram clay chips.

Best China Clay Poker Chips

All clay chips that weigh more than 11.5 grams have a metal insert in them to give them their weight. The larger the weight the heavier the chip.

Best Poker Chip Sets

All of our clay chips are either 39mm or 40mm in diameter. The thickness of most of the chips are the same too.