The Ten Dollar Fix for a Messy Poker Table

Nine years of hosting a Friday night game in my basement, and the thing that finally wore me down was not a bad beat. It was the chips. Six grown men, a folding table top, and loose stacks sliding around the felt like they had somewhere better to be.

I'm Gus Pellerin. Retired machinist, outside Toledo, Ohio. Started this game about nine years back and it's the same six faces most weeks: my brother-in-law Ray, my neighbor Tom, three fellas from the old shop. Small stakes, social, nobody's quitting a job over it.

The mess was the bank. Between games I kept a working pile of chips on the wood bar, and every time somebody needed change I'd be pawing through it. Knock one stack and they scatter under the bar stools. Get a green mixed in with the whites and you're still sorting at midnight. I tried a shoebox lid for a while. The lid slid off the bar every time somebody leaned on it, and I got tired of picking chips off the concrete floor at eleven at night.

About a year ago I bought a pack of ten Brybelly clear acrylic chip trays. Ten trays, each one holds a hundred chips, and I figured at that rate if they turned out to be junk I'd use them for screws in the shop.

They did not turn out to be junk. What I noticed first was how much less talking there was about chips. Which is a strange thing to be grateful for until you have hosted a game where four men are hunting through a pile for one red chip and the fifth man is dealing to himself. The first Friday after I set the trays out, Ray needed change twice and both times I just pointed. Nobody scattered a stack. Nobody crawled under the bar stools with a flashlight, which happened more than once in the old days.

Each tray holds a hundred chips, and I can see what's in it without lifting a thing.

The number that decided it for me was the size. Each tray measures 7.825 inches long, 2.7 wide and 0.625 deep. That is a standard tray, so a standard chip sits in the channel with a little face showing, and you can pinch one out with two fingers instead of digging. The depth matters more than I expected. Too shallow and the chips lean sideways, too deep and you are fishing with your fingertips. At five eighths of an inch my clay chips sit upright and stay upright through a whole night.

Two of the Brybelly trays hold the bank now, on the bar between games. The acrylic is see-through, so I can look at one and know what's in it. When Ray wants fives I point at the tray. That is the entire conversation. It has saved me a small amount of grief every single week for twelve months, and before that the bank was a rubber-banded stack of ones in a coffee can with everything else in that shoebox lid. The can rusted. The lid slid.

The rest do the setup work. Before anybody shows up I lay out six trays, one per player, and count each starting stack into its own tray. Tom likes his counted into two even stacks. Ray does not care as long as the colors are separated. Takes me about ten minutes on a Thursday night with the radio on, and when the doorbell starts going I carry the trays over and set them down. Nobody counts chips at the table while five other guys watch him do it, and nobody's stack leans into the next guy's stack by the second hour.

A year in, nothing has cracked. No chips on the corners, no crazing, no cloudiness where hands have been on them. Tom knocked one off the bar onto the concrete floor in March, full of a hundred chips, and it landed upside down. I picked it up expecting to see a crack and there wasn't one, so the chips went right back in it. I rinse them in the sink with dish soap about twice a year and let them air dry on a towel.

The honest limit: these are trays, not a case. They do not latch and they do not stack into a closed box, so if you want to carry chips to somebody else's house you still want the aluminum case. And the chips are not included. The listing says so plainly, but it's worth repeating because I have watched two different guys order these expecting a hundred chips to fall out of the box.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I'd tell you to measure a chip before you order. These are built for standard size chips and clay chips, and that is what I have got, so everything fit the first try. If you are running something oddly oversized, check it against the tray before you buy ten. I'd tell you to buy the ten pack, because I thought four would do it and I was wrong. Two for the bank, six for starting stacks, and the last two living in the gap in my case behind the bar, waiting for the day one finally goes. Mostly, though, I'd tell you that the Brybelly trays are the least interesting thing I have ever bought for this game and the one that changed the most Friday nights. Cards get replaced when they bend. Chips get replaced when the set gets old. The trays just quietly ended a mess I had gotten used to, and I did not realize how used to it I was until it was gone.