The History of the Casino Chip

The humble casino chip seems like such an important feature of the modern card table that it’s hard to imagine that they didn’t always exist. Early gamblers used whatever tokens came to hand, including sea shells, beans, bits of broken pottery and other improvised tokens. Of course, cash was a commonly used form of exchange. Gamblers in the Old West even used gold dust and gold nuggets to play with.

When the first casinos began to emerge in Europe in the 1800s, they used ivory, bone or clay tokens, sometimes circular or rectangular but also in the shape of animals or other images. To prevent counterfeiting, they began to mark them with the name of the casino.

The modern casino chip, made of a composite of clay and other materials, came into being in the 1880s. Distinctive, durable and affordable, they have remained the standard for casino visitors ever since.