Chips exist for practical reasons: they are faster to count, easier to see across a table, and harder to counterfeit than cash. They also make it psychologically easier to bet, which is not an accident.
Denominations follow a common colour convention in the United States, with white or blue at $1, red $5, green $25, black $100 and purple $500, but this is convention rather than rule and varies internationally.
Roulette uses a separate system: each player receives a distinct colour with no printed value, so bets sharing a square can be told apart. Those chips are worthless anywhere except that table and must be exchanged before leaving it.
Chips also carry a quiet cost. Because they do not feel like money, average bet sizes are reliably higher in chips than in cash, and casinos have understood this for a very long time. It is worth converting mentally at least once an hour, particularly at higher denominations where a single black chip is a meal and a purple one is a night's accommodation.
Where the numbers come from
Related terms in casino floor
- Commission — A percentage charged on winning bets that would otherwise favour the player.
- Push — A tie in which the bet neither wins nor loses and the stake is returned.
- Natural — A hand that wins immediately on the first cards dealt.
- Shoe — The box holding several shuffled decks from which cards are dealt.
- Cut card — A coloured plastic card placed in the shoe to mark where dealing stops.
- Penetration — The proportion of a shoe dealt before the reshuffle.
Where an entry quotes a number, that figure comes from the computed sections of this site rather than from another glossary, so the definition and the derivation cannot drift apart. Each entry links to the page where the number is worked out.