How to Tell if a Poker Chip Is Real?

Just like a currency that is counterfeit can create issues for us, in the world of casinos, poker chips are the medium that is used to play the games. The more chips the more chances of winning. How to tell if a poker chip is real? Let me tell you.

How do Casinos Identify Fake Poker Chips

Poker Chips

There are simple techniques for it:

1. Holographic Images
2. UV Inks
3. Serial Numbers
4. RFID

How much a poker chip is valued?

The replication of the poker chips is a crime and it can have bad consequences if you are involved in this. The chips have different values, like money has a par value the concept is different with the poker chips. Some chips are lower in value and are equivalent to $1 or some can have the value of $7.3 million.

The basic rule

The most basic rule is to never ever buy a poker chip outside the premises of a casino and certainly never online. They are only to be used in the casino that has issued it and strictly on the gaming table, you can’t buy food for example with these chips. This all is an illegal activity and if you are caught in this, you may end up in jail or a hefty lawsuit will be filed against you.

Just like money is printed fake, then the poker chips are certainly not spared by the frauds in the world who are in for easy money through illegal means. The most effective way to fool people with poker chips is by selling them online.

If after all this you are silly enough to buy a poker chip or inclined towards buying one outside the legal premises then we will tell you about how to know the pocket chip is real or fake.

Real Poker Chip vs Fake Poker Chip

The counterfeits are becoming really good. For example that day I bought a Ray-Ban for my wife but to our surprise from the RFID code we found out that it was a fake one but it was much better than the original one in some aspects and it was really hard to set the original apart from the fake one.

How to tell if a poker chip is real when you have a fake one in your hand the answer is simply that all the imitations are not perfect and some poker chips are so easy to differentiate from the real ones and you don’t need to be an expert for that. If the weight is not right, the color is faded and the graphics look bad, then be sure that it is not a real one.

Which Poker Chip has more counterfeits

The higher the value, the higher the chances of the counterfeits being created for it. The reason is simple, they give a boost to the chances of earning through illegal ways to the people involved in this. So be careful to not fall into their traps because that chip will be of no use to you as the measures discussed above and even the trained eyes of the staff working at a casino can set a fake one part from a real one in no time, and in most case, their naked eye is enough.

The Counterfeits of Expensive Poker Chips

How to Tell if a Poker Chip Is Real? Look at the weight, the feel, and the looks of it, but this is not applicable in all situations. The higher the value of the casino chip the higher the quality of the chips that are made to fool you. for instant the low-quality chips’ counterfeits are not designed and given such details because the margins for the scammers are low but as the value increases, let’s assume a poker chip worth $2000 means the summer can earn more, so they put more efforts into making the chip as real as possible.

Read more about the dimensions and weight of cards that are vital in casinos.

In today’s day and age, making an exact copy of something is not that hard. By just looking at the weight and feel of a  chip you can’t distinguish it from a fake one and the answer to your question, how to tell if a poker chip is real can’t be answered if you do these layman mistakes with the higher quality replicas, even the casino experts can’t tell if it is a real or a fake poker chip. For instant the counterfeits add weight very precisely in form of metal to match it in exact milligrams with the original one, so how can the naked human eye or your senses to determine weight can tell it apart from a real one? The simple answer is, no! There are security measures in casinos to protect themselves from receiving a fake poker chip.

The Checkpoints to Identify Fake Casino Chips

Security Measures

Casinos’ security mechanisms to secure their chips depend on their worth. The more precious a chip becomes, the more sophisticated measures will be used by the casinos.  Here are several measures used by various casinos to check fake casino chips:

Exclusivity

Any chip that is not part of the casino in which you are going to use it for the games will not be accepted by that casino, this is the principle of exclusivity used by casinos to protect themselves from fake poker chips. Casinos will not take chips from another casino to make it easy for their staff to track fake chips, if they started accepting poker chips from other casinos, it would be next to impossible to track the fake poker chips. They won’t take it even if you use it at a different branch in the same casino.

Surveillance

The surveillance is done for many purposes, broadly the word security here signifies the financial, physical, and security of the people in the casinos. With time this system has become so advanced that it can make the casino security aware of even the tiniest of details, including any illegal activity On the premises of the casino including the selling of fake poker chips.

Laser Printing and UV Inks

Laser printing is an economical technique to tell a fake poker chip apart from a real one. When does someone ask you a question on how to tell if a poker chip is real? Say that the laser images within the chip are one of the widest used technology and the combinations and tiny details are not easy to replicate but there are still some very high-quality counterfeits that can even replicate these laser images or details.

Another thing to look at it is UV inks. Your naked eye is not enough to notice this, you have to take help from technology. UV Ink is detected using special equipment and it makes it virtually impossible for the criminals to replicate the poker chips 100% accurately but the checking of this and all can take a lot of time for the staff at the casino and the customer service will be slow and the experience of the gamblers will be hampered.

Serial Number

The serial numbers are used to check if a poker chip is fake or not. This is a common practice during a theft or a massive robbery but the technique can come in handy to check if the fake casino chip is part of the database or not.

RFID Chips

High-value chips mean more ways of making easy money if they are replicated easily and this process of piracy is not stoping so the casinos have come up with a great feature, you can call it the equivalent of DRM as you see in the video gaming industry. If you give someone $400 to replicate an $800 chip they can easily do it and the naked eye nor some other techniques can catch you but with the  RFID chips, a central monitoring server prevents poker chips from being counterfeited.

The bottom line

Comparing fake cheap copies with real one is a piece of cake, even if you go to casinos not so regularly. . The use of paint, construction, and general quality construction differs from actual quality. They are easy to avoid and even the naked eye can say they are copies.

But there are also such detailed copies that they even have the most complex elements we can see in a genuine poker chip and the technology is fooled or imitated in a brilliant way.  Many of them may be found on the dark web, and they generally are the pricier chips—$200 and more. The people involved in this criminal business have done their research and one of the best ways to defeat them is to use RFID Poker Chips.