Should You Have Your Poker Chips Customized?

Some people love to add a personal touch to their poker game by having a custom poker table built for their homes. Custom poker tables are awesome, but they are outside the means of a lot of casual players. An alternative and affordable way to customize your poker experience is to have your poker chips customized.

With today’s technology, just about any digital image can be used to create personalized poker chips. But be aware: as with most poker accessories, not all custom poker chips for sale are created equally.

World Poker Tour Chips and Celebrity Chips

If you google customized poker chips, you’ll find quite a few poker outlets selling World Poker Tour chips online. A couple of warnings about these chips: When you buy a set of World Poker Tour chips, you are not actually buying poker chips that have been used in a World Poker Tour tournament. What you are buying is 11.5g composite clay, consumer grade chips with the official World Poker Tour graphic inlay.

Now, these are pretty cool chips to own, but they are not professional clay poker chips, nor are they customized poker chips. They are mass produced retail chips. Uncirculated World Poker Tour Chips specifically produced for World Poker Tour tournaments are available to buy, but they are more expensive. A real casino World Poker Tour poker chip will weigh about 10g, be compression molded, and have the logo of the casino where the tournament was played on one side of the chip. The retail World Poker Tour Chips found online have the WPT logo on printed on both sides of the chip and are of lower quality than casino chips.

Similarly you can also find “customized” celebrity chips online. Again, despite the marketing, these are not really customized poker chips. They are mass produced, 11.5g – 13.5g poker chips that have a picture of some poker star like Daniel Negreanu or Phil Hellmuth screen printed on the insert. You can buy these for the same price as any other mass produced chip, but honestly who wants to stare at Phil Hellmuth’s ugly mug for an entire night? Not me!

Custom Hot Stamped Poker Chips

One easy way to customize poker chips is to have them hot stamped. Hot stamping is the stamping of a gold leaf pattern onto the surface of a poker chip. Usually this is done with simple designs like a monogram. Many poker players also like having their poker chips hot stamped with dollar amounts.

Hot stamping is the cheapest way to customize poker chips and will run from between 10-15 cents per chip. The downside to hot stamping poker chips is that the gold leaf can flake or be scraped off the chip.

Partially and Fully Customized Poker Chips

There are really two levels of customization available to people who want their poker chips personalized. The cheaper of the two is the partially customized poker chip.

Partially customized poker chips are chips that allow customized text to be inserted into pre-made designs. Online custom chip dealers usually will give you a few different designs from which to choose and offer a way for you to preview how your custom text might look on the chip.

Fully customized poker chips start from scratch as far as design. You will usually need to at least make email contact with a company’s graphic artist to discuss whether the design you desire is workable. Usually you will be limited to several choices for the basic chip color, but the graphic laid onto the surface of the chip will be up to you.

Custom Inlay Poker Chips

Just about any good digital image can be transferred to a poker chip by using a custom inlay. A custom inlay poker chip is really just a fancy way of saying that a chip has been customized by placing a sticker with a graphic onto the inlay. The higher end inlays are laminated while the really cheap do-it-yourself types are just stickers.

The problem with either is that they tend to wear and peel with time. Also, because they are not part of the chip itself, you can feel the raised edges. The image on a custom inlay poker chip is restricted to the center of the chip. It cannot run from edge to edge.

Semi-customized inlay poker chips will cost you about 20-30 cents each, while a fully customized inlay chip will run from 45-80 cents.

Custom Graphic Embedded Poker Chip

If you want to preserve the quality of a customized graphic, you’ll need to buy custom graphic embedded poker chips. Graphic imbedded poker chips use a process that actually burns the graphic right into your chip so it becomes part of it. This ensures that your customized chips will not wear or fade with time.

Graphic embedded chips can be created with any quality digital image. A partial chip customization will cost from between 75-90 cents a chip, while a fully customized poker chip will run from between $1.00 and $1.50 per chip.

Other Customized Poker Supplies

If you’re thinking about having your poker chips customized, a good way to pull your theme together is with other customized poker accessories. The same methods discussed above can also be used to create custom printed dealer buttons, playing cards, drink coasters, and custom engraved chip cases.

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