Brybelly Acrylic Chip Trays vs an Aluminum Chip Case

I have both of these in my basement right now, about four feet apart, and that is the most useful thing I can tell you about either one. The Brybelly clear acrylic chip trays sit on the bar holding the bank. The aluminum chip case my clay set came in sits on the shelf behind the bar holding a couple hundred spare chips. Three years with the case and a year with the trays, and I have quit thinking of them as rivals. They solve two different problems, and the only real question is which problem you have.

Here is the short answer. If you host and the chips mostly stay in your house, the trays do more work for you than a case ever will. You can see every denomination at a glance, you can build six starting stacks before anybody rings the doorbell, and the bank sits open on the bar all night. If you haul chips to somebody else's game, or you want one sealed box that holds everything, the aluminum case wins and it is not close. Most hosts I know end up with both, in that order, and the Brybelly pack is the piece that gets used every single week.

	Brybelly Acrylic Chip Trays	Aluminum Chip Case
Capacity	Ten trays at 100 chips each	One case, 500 chips
Finding a denomination mid-hand	See-through, readable from across the table	Lid up, lean in, study the rows
Setting up six starting stacks	Load trays before anyone arrives	Count out of the case onto the felt
Counting a stack without doing it twice	Rows let you count in twenties by eye	Deeper well, fiddlier to count into
Carrying chips to another house	Open trays, chips slide, needs a bag	Latches shut with a handle
Storage between games	Open to dust on a shelf	Sealed and stacked
Chips included	Trays only, chips not included	Arrives as a full set with chips and buttons
Long-term durability	Acrylic can crack if dropped on concrete	Aluminum dents instead of shattering
Best for	Hosts who run the bank and set stacks	Players who move chips house to house

How I Ended Up With Both

About three years ago I threw out a cheap plastic 300-chip set because the chips had gone tacky and stuck to each other in the rack. I replaced it with a Fat Cat 500-chip clay set that came in an aluminum case, and for two years that case was the whole system. Open it on the card table, deal out stacks by hand, close it up at the end of the night. It worked. It was also slow, and the slow part was always the counting.

A year ago I bought a pack of ten Brybelly trays to fix the counting. Two trays hold the bank now, white ones through black hundreds. The rest get loaded with starting stacks before the game, and whatever is left over rides in the gap at the top of the Fat Cat case. That is the arrangement. It has not changed in a year of Friday nights, and I have not once been tempted to go back to counting out of a lid.

I am not a collector and I am not running a casino. It is six guys in a finished basement outside Toledo, small stakes, and a game that has been going for nine years. When you host that long, you stop caring how a thing looks on a shelf and start caring how it behaves at 7:40 on a Friday when five people are already seated and the sixth is walking down the stairs.

Where the Brybelly Trays Win

Visibility is the whole thing. On a card table under a lamp, an open tray shows you every stack at once. Whites, red fives, blue tens, green twenty-fives, black hundreds, laid out in rows you can read from across the room. The aluminum case does not do that. You lift the lid, and what you get is chips in a shallow well that you have to lean over and study, with the lid standing in your way the entire time you are trying to make change for a buy-in.

Setup is the second thing. Six players, and I like stacks ready before the first knock on the basement door. With the trays I lay out six empty ones, count out rows, and the game starts on time. With the case alone I was pulling chips out of one compartment and building piles on the felt while somebody sat down mid-count wanting to buy in. That is a small thing until you do it fifty Fridays in a row.

Then there is the count itself. A tray holds 100 chips, and 100 chips in rows lets you count in twenties with a finger and an eye instead of one at a time. After nine years of hosting I can tell you the counting is what makes the job feel like work. Two minutes at the start of the night, two minutes at the end, and neither one of those minutes feels like hosting. The trays turned both into something I do while I am talking to Ray about his truck.

Where the Aluminum Case Wins

Transport, plain and simple. Two or three times a year the game moves to Tom's place or over to my brother-in-law Ray's, and when it does, the trays stay home. An open tray of chips in the back of a truck is a spill waiting to happen. The case latches shut and has a handle, and I have carried it up the basement stairs one-handed more times than I can count. No tray does that job, and no tray is sold claiming to.

Storage is the other half of it. My basement is finished but it is still a basement, and a shelf behind a bar collects dust. The case keeps chips sealed and stacked and out of the way for six days out of seven. Trays left out loaded will collect whatever the air down there has in it, and you will be wiping them down before the game instead of setting up.

And I should be straight about the biggest point in the case column. Mine came with chips in it. The Brybelly trays do not include chips, and the listing says so plainly rather than burying it. If you are starting from nothing, a case set that arrives with 500 chips and two dealer buttons solves your whole problem in one box. The trays solve a problem you only have after you already own chips and already have a game going.

What the Trays Feel Like in the Hand

Each tray measures 7.825 inches long, 2.7 inches wide, and 0.625 inches deep. That is a hair under eight inches, so two loaded trays side by side take up about sixteen inches of bar top. The whole bank fits on a two-foot stretch of my bar with room left for a coaster. The pack of ten weighs 1.7 pounds empty, which means a single tray is light enough to pick up by one corner with three fingers, even loaded.

The material is acrylic, and it feels like the clear plastic they make display cases out of. Stiff, not flexible. The lip that holds the chips is shallow, a bit over half an inch, which is what makes it easy to reach in and pull a stack with two fingers. It is also what makes it easy to knock one over if you slide a loaded tray across the felt too fast. I have not dumped one. I have come close, and I have learned to pick the tray up rather than shove it.

Loading them is the part I did not expect to enjoy. A hundred chips slide in and line up on their own if you tilt the tray right, and when the rows are full you can see at a glance whether a stack is short. That is not a feature anybody advertises. It is just what happens when you can see through the thing you are holding.

A hundred chips per tray, ten trays in the pack, and my whole bank fits on two feet of bar top. That is the entire pitch, and it is enough.

A Year of Fridays: The Wear Report

A year in, nothing has cracked. One tray has a scuff on the bottom from being slid across the bar. One has a small scratch near the lip where I dropped a short stack of blacks into it from too high. That is the whole damage report. Acrylic does not bend, it breaks, so a loaded tray dropped on a concrete floor would probably lose a corner. Mine live on a bar and a card table and have never met concrete.

The case has taken its own lumps over three years. The hinge is still tight and the latches still catch, but the aluminum has a few dents from being set down hard, and the felt inside has flattened where the chips sit. Aluminum dents where acrylic would shatter, and that is the honest reason people keep buying cases. Both of these will outlast me. If I am wrong about the acrylic, replacing a single tray is not a decision I have to sit with.

The Small Annoyances Nobody Mentions

The trays do not stack worth a darn when they are loaded. Empty, they nest and the whole pack disappears into a drawer. Loaded, you cannot set one on top of another without pressing down on the chips, and pressing down on chips in a shallow tray is how chips end up on the floor. So the loaded ones go side by side and take up shelf space that a closed case would not.

They also are not a carrying case, and they are not sold as one. If you buy ten of these expecting to move your whole bank to a friend's house, you will end up with chips in a grocery bag and a story about it. Buy the trays for the house and keep a case for the road. That is the division of labor, and it took me a year of Fridays to stop trying to make one thing do both jobs.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the Brybelly trays if you host. It is close to that simple. If the chips live in your house and come out once a week, the trays give you a visible bank, faster setup, and a count you can do while carrying on a conversation. Six players, five denominations, ten trays, and you will wonder why you spent two years counting out of a lid.

Buy an aluminum case, or keep the one you already own, if the chips travel. If you play at other people's houses more often than you host, a latched case with a handle is the right tool and the trays are a drawer organizer you would have to bag up anyway. And if you are buying chips for the first time, a case set that arrives with chips and buttons beats buying trays for chips you do not own yet.

If you are where I was a year ago, with a case on the shelf and a slow count every Friday, buy the trays and keep the case. That is not a compromise. That is the arrangement that actually works in a basement game, and it is the one I would set up again tomorrow if I had to start over.

Who Should Skip It

Skip the trays if your whole set is one drawer of 300 chips and the bank is a plastic tub. Ten trays hold a thousand chips. You would be buying nine more trays than you need, and the tenth would be doing a job a bowl already does. I like these things and I would still tell you that to your face.

Skip them too if you are the guy who brings the chips every week. You want a case with a handle and you want it to latch. There is no version of an open tray that survives a car ride, and I have watched a chip roll under a truck seat to prove it.