The following information is a guide to the highly customized nature of poker chips used in casinos for gambling. The gaming industry often refers to casino poker chips as ‘cheques’ to differentiate them from other ‘chips’ used in casinos that carry no value, such as the chips used in Roulette.

The construction of poker chips for casino use is variable dependent on the manufacturer supplying the casino, and the casino has much choice over a number of factors from chip composition (usually clay composite), to security features that enables a high degree of customization. Although most casinos would describe their personalized chips as clay chips, it is very rare for any chips to be made entirely of clay. Personalized casino poker chips are most accurately described as being compression moulded chips and are nearly always a composite material involving clay, but far more durable that chips made 100% of clay. The process used by suppliers to forge these chips is very expensive and time intensive. It is referred to as compression moulding because the process involves extremely high pressures and temperatures (usually around ten thousand pounds per square inch and three hundred degrees F).

Casinos nearly always use their own artwork to customize their poker chips. These graphics are printed on to the clay chips and is often referred to as an inlay. The inlay is nearly always paper covered by film of plastic and is almost inseparable from the poker chip due to the compression moulding process.

Chips vary in weight from around 7.5g to 13.5g giving casinos more scope to personalize their orders from suppliers. Typically customized casino poker chips weigh more than 10g and are heavier than those usually supplied for home games. Poker chips supplied for home games are often manufactured with injection moulding technology using materials such as ABS plastic, sometimes with metal inserts to add extra weight.

Casinos must carry specified reserves of cash to back the values of the chips they use and potential winnings from other casino games. For this reason, casino poker chips are unique i.e. customized using security features to identify a given chip with a particular casino. These security features involve personalization of all the features of a chip that are able to be customized, from artwork to the use of RFID technology.

High levels of security make it extremely difficult to produce counterfeit poker chips of any real quality. Casinos usually have methods to thwart the plans of counterfeiters, such as replacing all the casino chips with very similar ones but slightly different markings.

The poker chips used by casinos on the floor tend to be higher quality than those used in casino tournaments. As the poker chips used in tournaments have no cash value, they are usually much simpler in design (especially regarding security features) i.e. less customized. At events such as the World Series of Poker and other televised poker tournaments, the quality of the chips used is more or less the same as on the casino floor.