Understanding the Basics of Poker Chip Values and Color

While each casino around the world has its own unique poker chip collection, you’ll find that the values and the colors of these chips are relatively uniform. You can walk into a casino in the UK, become familiar with the chips used there, then catch a flight to Vegas and find that, for the most part, the values and colors are the same.

If you’re completely new to the world of poker and want to familiarize yourself with the common values and colors of poker chips, take a look below.

Poker Chip Values

Poker is a game that requires a number of different valued chips; having a combination of small and large denomination chips makes the game run smoother. To facilitate this, you’ll find that most poker rooms have a healthy mix of low and high-denomination chips that can be used across games of all stake levels. Let’s take a look at the most common chip values you’ll find at a casino.

• $1
• $5
• $25
• $100
• $500
• $1000

As you can see, the value of the chips rises very quickly, as there is often less need for small denomination chips; why bother making a $2 chip when you can just use two $1 chips? In some casinos, you may find $10 or $20 chips, but these are in the minority.

Poker Chip Colors

Poker chips are often colored to help make them easily distinguishable from across the table. It’s much easier to see what your opponent has in their stack if you can see they’ve got a stack of red and two stacks of blue rather than three stacks of black that could be any denomination.

Just like how chip values are standardized in many casinos, so are chip colors. You can often walk into several different casinos and find that they color their chips in the same way, even if the designs are different. Below, we’ve listed the most common colorings of cash chips.

• $1 – White
• $5 – Red
• $25 – Green
• $100 – Black
• $500 – Purple
• $1000 – Orange

You’ll notice that we said cash chips, and that’s because cash game chips and tournament chips are often very different from one another.

Poker Chip Color Value: Cash Games vs. Tournaments

Every single casino you go to will clearly differentiate their poker chips for cash games and their poker chips from tournaments. This is primarily to avoid confusion and to stop people from passing off tournament chips as cash game chips (or vice versa). Cash game chips have a real money value that can be cashed out at any time, whereas tournament chips have no real money value, so it’s important to keep the two separate.

Chip Values in Poker Tournaments

We’ve already covered the most common values of cash game chips, so let’s take a look at the most commonly used tournament chips.

• 25 – Green
• 100 – Black
• 500 – Blue
• 1000 – Yellow
• 5000 – Grey
• 25,000 – Brown
• 100,000 – Pink
• 500,000 – Red
• 1,000,00 – Gold

As tournament chips do not have a cash value, they’re commonly referred to as T$ or “tournament dollars.” This is an easy way to distinguish between real money chips and tournament money chips when discussing the game.

High-Value Chips in Tournaments

When a casino or poker room is holding a poker tournament, it’s vital that they have enough high-value chips in play to meet demand. The $500 and $1000 chips are rarely seen in cash games as the stacks don’t get big enough, but due to the nature of tournaments, big chips are always required.

Color-Ups

One of the reasons why the color of poker chips is important in tournament poker is because of color-ups. Color-ups are when the tournament staff will remove the lower-value chips in play and replace them with higher ones. If your lower-valued chips cannot be equally replaced by a higher-valued one, the tournament staff will round up or down, depending on how many chips you have.

For example, if the tournament staff are doing a color up of the T$25 chips, a player with five T$25 chips will not receive a T$100 chip, whereas a player with seven T$25 chips will receive two T$100 chips.

Color-ups reduce the number of physical chips in play while keeping stack sizes the same, making the games easier to manage.

Stacking Poker Chips by Color Values

Another reason chip color is important is because it makes it easier for people to identify how many chips a person has. If a player has a stack of 20 black tournament chips, you know they have T$2000, and if they have a stack of 20 blue tournament chips, you know they have T$10,000.

Being able to easily identify how many chips your opponent has makes the game run quicker, as players can spend more time making their decision and less time counting how many chips their opponent has.

Removing Colored Chips From Casinos

While it may be tempting to take some chips home from a casino, it’s best to check with the poker room manager before doing so. Usually, it’s perfectly fine for players to take home cash game chips, especially if they’re playing in the game regularly. This allows players to sit down and play immediately, without having to wait to exchange their cash for chips. One thing to be aware of is that some casinos regularly change their cash game chips and will not accept any old chips once the new ones are in play.

However, in tournaments, it’s strictly forbidden to take any chips away from the playing area. Even if the chip is no longer in play, it must stay in the poker room and in full view of the tournament staff. This is to prevent players from taking chips from one tournament and using them in another. The tournament staff will count down the number of chips in play at the end of every tournament to ensure that none have been taken.

If you’re found trying to remove tournament chips from the playing room you will likely be ejected from the tournament and possibly banned from the poker room altogether.

Rectangular Poker Chips

A special kind of poker chip that is often only seen in high-limit games is the rectangular chip or the “plaque.” While plaques behave exactly like poker chips, there’s a certain allure that comes with using a plaque. They’re much bigger than chips and often weigh considerably more, which lends a certain gravitas to your bet. Some poker rooms do offer “lower stakes” plaques of $500 or $1000 to give low-limit players a taste of what it’s like to be a high roller.

Setting Chip Values And Stack Sizes For Home Games

One of the hardest parts of running a home game is setting the poker chip value for your Texas Hold’em game. Even if you splash out on a numbered chipset, you may find that the numbers won’t apply to the type of game you want to host.

The best way to assign value to your chips is to use the common color scheme used by casinos, as some players may already be familiar with the general concept. This means you want to use the white chips as your lowest valued chip, then the red chips, then green, then black, then blue/purple.

Home Game Poker Chip Color Values

The exact value of your chip will depend on the game you’re playing. As a rule of thumb, you’ll want your lowest-value chip to be 1bb and your highest-value chip to be either 25bb or 100bb, depending on the number of chips in play.

For example, if you’re playing a $0.05/$0.10 cash game, your white chips should be worth $0.10, your red chips $0.50, your green chips $2.50, and your black chips $10.

However, if there’s a shortage of chips to make change with, you may want to introduce some lower-valued chips into the game. This can be done by removing the higher-valued chips and instead using them as lower-valued chips. In the above example, you could reassign the black chip from $10 to $1.

Home Game Tournament Poker Chip Color Values

Running a home game tournament can be difficult due to the limited number of chips and the increasing blinds. It can also be a challenge getting enough chips to meet demand, as most poker sets only come with 300 chips. Depending on the number of players in your tournament, that doesn’t leave room for many spares, so make sure to account for this when setting up your stacks.

Depending on your tournament structure, you often want players to start with at least 100/200bb. If you’re playing with a standard five-color set, you may want to assign your chip values like so:

• White Chips – T$25
• Red Chips – $T50
• Green Chips – T$250
• Black Chips – T$1000
• Blue/Purple Chips – T$2500

With starting blinds of T$25/T$50, you can give each player ten white chips, ten red chips, six green chips, five black chips, and one blue/purple chip. This will give players T$9,750 in chips with plenty left over for change.

As the blinds increase past the lower levels, your lowest-valued chips will become obsolete, and you may need to reassign their value. In the above example, once the blinds have reached a sufficiently high level, you can color up the white chips and reallocate them as $50 chips.

Chip Values For Major Tournaments

To make things easier for players, some major tournament series have uniform chip colors that they use for all of their events, no matter where they’re held. Two big examples of this are the WSOP and EPT. Let’s take a look at their chip structures.

WSOP

Due to the large-scale tournaments at the WSOP, there is a huge range in the value of the chips you can receive. They start from as low as T$25 and go all the way up to T$5,000,000. Here’s a full breakdown of the chips you’ll see at the WSOP.

• T$25 – Green & Yellow
• T$100 – Black & Blue
• T$500 – Light red & Maroon
• T$1000 – Yellow & Orange
• T$5000 – Orange & Brown
• T$25,000 – Dark Green & Blue
• T$50,000 – Pink & Green
• T$100,000 – Red & Silver
• T$250,000 – Beige & Bronze
• T$500,000 – Red & Blue
• T$1,000,000 – Orange & Green
• T$5,000,000 – Grey & Pink

When looking at the color schemes, the dominant color goes first, and the “trim” is the second color. For example, the T$100 chip is predominantly black, but it has a blue trim around the edges.

The value of these chips is subject to change, as the WSOP will sometimes reassign chips for televised final tables.

EPT

One of the other major tournament series that uses the same chips for every tournament is the EPT. The EPT travels to casinos all over Europe, so to eliminate the confusion for their regular players, they’ve implemented their own chip design which is used for every event.

• T$25 – Green
• T$100 – Black
• T$500 – Purple
• T$1000 – Red
• T$5000 – Yellow
• T$10,000 – Blue
• T$25,000 – Grey
• T$50,000 – Pink

As you can see, the highest-valued EPT chip is considerably smaller than the highest-valued WSOP chip. This is because the WSOP gets considerably larger fields than the EPT, so higher-valued chips are more often required. If the need occurs, the EPT will take high-valued chips from their venue and put them into play.

A brief history of poker chips

Many people say that the real genius behind gambling is the person who invented chips, as betting with something other than cash creates a disconnect that allows us to be more relaxed when gambling. While people have been using tokens to gamble for centuries, what we would consider to be modern poker chips first came into use in the early 1800s. However, these early chips were easy to copy, so by the late 19th century, companies were commissioned to create unique chips to be made that could not easily be forged.

Clay poker chips

These early chips were made from clay and often came with a pattern to symbolize the betting establishment they belonged to. However, these chips were brittle and were frequently broken during the course of play. Over the years, additives were added to these chips to make them more durable.

These additive-enriched chips are the most common type of chip you’ll see in play today. However, the best-quality chips, such as those used by the EPT, are called “ceramic” chips. While they’re called ceramic, they’re actually made from a plastic resin and are considerably more expensive to manufacture.

Plastic home game chips

The chips in many home game poker sets are made from cheap plastic. This makes them cheap to manufacture, and therefore cheap to buy. Progression has been made in the world of home game chipsets, and you can now buy chips with metal inserts or ones that are made partially from clay. However, the fancier the chip, the more expensive the set, so many casual players stick to cheap plastic poker chips.

Poker chip sizes

The size of poker chips is relatively consistent across cardrooms, with only a small deviation between different casinos. Most poker chips are around 40mm in diameter, and the standard thickness is around 3.5mm. Some larger denomination chips will be larger, but only by a few millimeters. The weight of a poker chip will vary depending on the material it’s made out of, with the lightest chips weighing around 7g and the heaviest chips weighing around 20g.

Conclusion

Poker chips are a vital tool of the game, so it’s important to know the value of them before you use them. The last thing you want to do is bet with the wrong chips and end up costing yourself hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars! After reading this article, you should have a good understanding of the common chip values and colors you’ll see in play, making it easier to identify which chips you’re using.