My advice is to consider two pieces of information before purchasing poker chips. First you should decide on a suitable material quality for the chips (suitable depending on your circumstances and poker needs) and secondly the quantity of chips you’ll need. Broadly speaking, there are three types of material poker chip suppliers use to create chips that vary in quality, durability and cost.

Clay Poker Chips

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). Clay poker chips can be supplied to the home poker game markets but there is much competition from other cheaper materials, which often are better suited to customization. Typically clay chips are used by professionals and gambling houses.

Metal Insert Chips

Home poker games nearly always involve the use of plastic chips and they often feel of distinctly lower quality than professional clay chips. Often metal is used as an insert in the chips and plastic is molded around the metal. This gives the chip a feel of greater quality. Typically they weigh either 8 or 11.5g. They are regarded as the closest match to the clay chips found in casinos and are often labeled as ABS plastic chips. ABS chips are often referred to as clay composite chips even though there is no clay in them. They are often regarded as the most suitable chip to customize, accommodating the widest range of personalization mediums from hand drawn graphics to photography.

Basic plastic chips

In contrast to the ABS plastic chips referred to above, typical plastic chips are far separated from casino clay chips in quality, but you get what you pay for and you’ll make big savings by opting for this type. Buying this type of chip is a great place to start.

So, we have briefly described the different chip materials and now it is time to decide how many to buy. Typically sets range from 100 and 500 up to 1000 chips. Clearly the number of chips required depends on the number of players in the game and also whether you’ll be supplying all the chips for the game or each player will bring their own customized set. In total, a game of 3 or 4 players will usually require around 200 chips, 5 to 6 players will require around 400-500 chips and 7 to 8 players need about 600 chips. 1000 chip sets are excessive unless your game involves over 10 players. My advice is to err on the side of caution and order too many rather than too few.