Poker Chips Explained

If you’ve never played poker before, it’s easy to think that the game is just about the cards and the different hands you can make. However, poker chip values are just as important – especially when you’re aiming to bluff your way through to the showdown.

Casinos use chips instead of cash for a few reasons – for one, it’s a good way to prevent fraud, and they’re easy to track. What’s more, chip handling is faster and easier for players and dealers than rifling through paper cash!

In this buying poker chips guide, we’ll take you through the main poker chip denominations, what the colours mean, and how chip values vary when you’re playing in tournaments.

Common chip colours and their values

There may be some variations from casino to casino, but poker chip colours tend to follow the same hierarchy. Here’s how the poker chip values typically break down by colour:

Chip Colour Value Table

In some cases, you’ll also find that blue chips are worth a lot more, and that there are additional colours – such as purple, brown, grey and maroon – which are much higher stakes than those listed here.

In online and live casino games, such as those available at LeoVegas, you’ll sometimes find that chips have values printed on them. However, this isn’t always the case at land-based casinos, so it’s worth learning the colour rankings just in case.

How poker chip values vary in tournaments

When playing in a major poker tournament, you’ll likely find that the values of poker chips and their corresponding colours will vary compared to the breakdown listed here. That’s often because they have much higher denominations, and they don’t usually present financial values.

You might buy into a tournament, such as the World Series of Poker (WSOP), for a set amount of money and receive thousands of chip values broken down into different colours. These chips don’t represent real cash – but they’re used to help track value across the game.

Colour arrangements in tournaments are also handy for calculating stacks. For example, you can calculate roughly how much another player is raising simply by looking at the height of their red chips.

Let’s look back at the WSOP tournament. Here, the lowest poker chip values are green (25), black (100), light blue (500), yellow (1,000) and orange (5,000). At the upper end, there are oversized chips – oversized red (500,000), oversized yellow (1,000,000) and oversized purple (5,000,000).

Regardless, it’s always wise to check the chip values and rules of any tournaments you join before buying in.

Poker buy-ins

Setting up poker buy-ins in a traditional home game is easy when you know how, especially if you have a set of chips where the values are branded on the tops. However, you can set any denomination rules you wish.

For example, you might still choose to set white chips at £1 each, red at £5 each, and green at £25. If you want to raise the stakes and make it a high-roller game, you would bring in other colours and set much higher values – or, switch the values of some of your existing colours.

Ideally, try to distribute 50-60 chips each per person, and set a minimum and maximum buy-in, so that you can fairly distribute enough chips to whoever requests them.

Poker chip colours in Europe and the US

You might also find that there are differences in colour values between US and European games, though again, variations may occur simply depending on the casino you’re playing at. The short table offered above still works as a basic template for the chip values you can expect. However, it’s wise to check out each specific poker chip guide before you buy in.

Some casino chips across European venues may even use heavier or rectangular chips to show off higher denominations. This isn’t always a common practice, however, and again, it’s worth following the general rule of thumb.

There might even be differences in the materials used to make the chips you play with – but this is typically as a result of regional preference, rather than anything specific to the gameplay.

Now that you know a bit more about how casino chips work with regard to poker online and offline, why not try some live poker games from our catalogue?