We're gonna start a new series here on Gambling Weblog - Home Gaming Supplies. This first few articles will focus on a topic near and dear to my heart - poker chips.

Someone once said "the person who invented poker was smart. The guy who invented the Poker chip was a genius." It's very, very true. Poker chips (and blackjack, roulette and pai gow chips) allow you to wager without looking at actual cash. They're small, easy to manipulate, easy to count, and provide a level of insulation between the gambler and their perception of actual money.

There are many different kinds of poker chips, and we'll take a few articles here to give you a background on what kinds of poker chips you want to buy, how many you need, and what online resources there are for chips.

Most of us are very accustomed to the plastic Bicycle brand red, white and blue poker chips that we grew up playing with. If you were very lucky, your set maybe came with yellows as well. These are the absolute bottom of the barrel of poker chips, and no one with an age in the double digits should ever play with them. Period. Don't care, there's no excuse.

One small step higher than the plastic poker chips are the "dice" chips. These very cheap chips are what you find at Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and occasionally at the grocery store in the prepackaged "poker kits." They are a hard plastic around a metal slug to give them weight. They are often billed as "casino grade," or "casino weight." Just because something's heavy doesn't mean it's any good. These chips are frequently 11.5 - 13 gram chips, considerably heavier than any chips that are actually in use at a casino. They are also so far below the quality of chips used in casinos as to be ridiculous.

The only benefit to dice chips is their price. They are very inexpensive, and if you're just starting up a home game you can get a set, play with them for a little while, and then upgrade later once you've fleeced your friends for a couple months!

Next time we'll take a look at some higher-end home game chips.