“Chips” – What Does It Mean?

Published on 21st June 2019 by James

One of the biggest hurdles that a new player has to overcome is getting to grips with the gaming terminology. If you want to get into a new sport, a new hobby, or just try your hand at gambling, then you need to know what everyone is talking about.

We all know the feeling: everyone else knows something and you’re just the dunce in the room.

Well, our new series is here to save you. We’re going to be giving you that vital information, the gold-dust of jargon, breaking down all the gaming terminology so you’ll never be left behind.

This is our first installment, so we’re going to look at something simple but incredibly important: chips. Let’s dive into casino chips like Scrooge McDuck into a giant vault of gold coins.

Casino Chips – Everything You Need To Know

Let’s have a look at chips – and we don’t mean the sort you get with fish and gravy!

History of Chips

The potted history of casino chips is that they were the product of the massively popular seventeenth-century Spanish game Ombre. Whilst this game has fallen out of the mainstream, although sharing many features with modern-day versions of bridge, the chips it used have gone nowhere.

The development of chips really took off with their introduction into early nineteenth-century poker, at first a lesser used exonumia (a big word and overly complex word for cash tokens, but we like it), they soon became the standard by the 1900s.

Casinos now had companies that made their chips, and these chips also featured their individuating colour schemes – still a defining feature today, one used to see off counterfeiting.

The Use Of Casino Chips

Today casino chips are used in both on-land and online casinos, and in both places they basically serve the same function. Albeit, they’re more important on land.

The chip is a token which stands in for a specific denomination of money. The chip itself has no intrinsic value but merely represents a certain value of real-world money. You exchange your real money for chips at the casino cashier, who will give you chips reflecting that amount.

On land, chips have to be taken everywhere with you in the casino and are taken from game to game. You must get your chips as you enter, and cash them all out as you leave. However, this isn’t common practice online. Each online game will have chips within it and your balance is automatically displayed in terms of them. Once you exit the game, they become real money again; you never really have to exchange anything online.

Hopefully, this casino terminology 101 has gotten you up to speed. Look out for our next installment soon!

Where To Spend Your Chips?

It’s all well and good knowing what chips are, but you also need to know where to spend those round moolah tokens.

Check below for our top casinos who’ll give you the best value for money and welcome rewards:



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