As the game grew in stature, a need for standardized currency arose, which led to the invention of poker chips. People avoided carrying large amount of cash and poker chips provided them with a substitute to same value of cash. Today, you can have a mountain of chips in front of you — and isn’t that so much cooler than having cash money?

Soon the poker chips were being used everywhere, bars and gambling houses being the major players who collected a fee in return for safekeeping the cash and surrogating it with poker chips. The first chips made use of wood, bones etc but in late 1800’s clay poker chips replaced them.

Coming with the technological progression, new materials came into play like plastic and acrylic which provided a cheap and useful proxy to clay chips. Metals and ivory were also being used by some major gambling houses.

With poker chips flooding the market, counterfeits too came into existence. Thus began the process for customization of casino chips with a specific design by each casino having its own custom-made tokens installed with microchips. These poker chips could be easily differentiated from the fake ones on the basis of texture, make and a specified weight.

A set of poker chips nowadays costs trifle of what it used to cost, thanks to the globalization and technological advancement, companies nowadays have the capability to produce millions of poker chips at a stretch.