Brybelly Chip Trays Honest Review: Cheap Acrylic Done Right

Nobody tells you that a chip tray is a solved problem. That is the honest review in one sentence. A year ago I bought the Brybelly ten pack of acrylic trays for the Friday night game in my basement, and I have spent the time since trying to find something wrong with them, because a review that finds nothing wrong is not a review, it is an advertisement with a byline.

Here is where I was starting from. Six players, most Fridays, small stakes, an old shop-crew crowd. The chips live in a Fat Cat five hundred chip Claytec set that sits in its aluminum case on the shelf behind the bar, and that case came with trays already. Good trays. They worked fine. But every week I was hauling trays from the shelf to the bar to count out starting stacks, then hauling them back, and one night I set a loaded tray down on the felt, caught it with my elbow, and spent ten minutes on my knees fishing chips out from under the table while five grown men offered advice. That was the real problem. Not quality. Quantity.

How I Have Used Them for a Year

The Brybelly trays arrived as ten of them nested together and wrapped, roughly the size of a thick book. The package dimensions on the listing say about 11.73 by 8.66 by 3.62 inches and the whole thing weighs 1.7 pounds, which tells you most of what you need to know about the material. There is no hardware here. No hinges, no latches, no lids. It is molded acrylic and nothing else.

The way I actually run it now: two trays live on the bar holding the bank, sorted by denomination so I can make change without digging. White ones, red fives, blue tens, green twenty-fives, black hundreds. Four more trays come out when I set up starting stacks, one per player, so I count out a hundred chips for each man and hand him the whole tray. He carries it to his seat and dumps it. That sounds like a small thing until you have watched six people count chips out of a shared pile for fifteen minutes while the ice melts.

The remaining four sit in the gap in the Fat Cat case where the original trays do not quite fill the space. That is not a designed feature, it is me stuffing trays in a gap, but it has held up. Nothing has cracked in a year of that, which is more than I can say for the plastic bins in my shop.

The first Friday I owned them, I set the ten trays out on the bar an hour early and counted starting stacks while the coffee was still hot. Two hundred white, a hundred and fifty red, a hundred blue, thirty green, twenty black. Six players at a hundred apiece came to six hundred chips out of the tray bank, and the whole count took me under four minutes because I was pulling from sorted trays instead of digging through a case with the lid propped on my hip. The old way ran closer to fifteen minutes and I usually did it with a flashlight in my teeth. I have done it the same way every Friday since, with one change: I stopped bothering to do it early. Now I can start after the first man walks in and still have stacks on the felt before the second one gets his coat off.

What a Hundred Chips Per Tray Actually Means

Each tray holds one hundred chips. The listing says so, the dimensions back it up, and I counted them myself the first week because I did not believe it. A tray measures 7.825 inches long, 2.7 inches wide, and 0.625 inches deep, and the chips sit on edge in the tray rather than lying flat in a stack. That last part is worth knowing before you buy, because it means a loaded tray is not a sealed box. It is a rack with the top half of every chip out in the open.

Before I bought these I tried the free option, which was to keep using the three trays that came in the Fat Cat case and stack them on the bar. That half worked. Three trays held three hundred chips, so the other two hundred stayed loose in the case, which meant every week I was still digging black chips out of a corner while a man stood there waiting for change. I also tried a plastic compartment tray that came out of a craft store organizer, the sort sold for beads and buttons, and that lasted one night. The compartments were sized for beads, not chips, so a stack leaned, slid, and the whole thing went over when Ray set his drink down next to it. That is the honest reason I went looking for a proper tray, and it is why I think of this as less of an upgrade and more of a fix for something that was never supposed to be a tray in the first place.

Back to the count. Five of the ten Brybelly trays equal my entire five hundred chip set. That is the arithmetic that makes the ten pack sensible rather than excessive. If you own a five hundred chip set and want to hand every player a counted stack, you need five trays minimum. If you own a thousand chips, you need ten, and then you have nothing left over for the bank. Which brings me to the first honest complaint.

Ten trays is the right number if you run six players and keep the bank in two of them. It is the wrong number if you run nine or ten players with a big set, because you will be short. I would rather see this sold as a twelve pack, or as a five pack so a man could buy two. As it stands, the ten pack is a good fit for a home game and a slightly awkward fit for anything larger.

The Part Nobody Mentions: There Are No Lids

The listing does not hide this, but it does not lead with it either. These trays are open on top. There is no lid, no cover, no snap-on anything. If you turn a loaded tray upside down, you will be picking chips up off the floor. I know this because I did it in month two, in front of company.

For my use, that is fine and maybe even correct. I am moving chips six feet from a shelf to a bar. A lid would just be a thing to lose. But if you are the guy who lugs chips to somebody else's house every week, or if your game room is also the room where the cat sleeps, open trays are a real drawback. Dust settles in them. So does cat hair, and if you have ever tried to get a cat hair out from between two clay chips, you know how that ends.

Summer is where it shows worst. From June through August the game runs every other week instead of weekly, because I am on Lake Erie after walleye most Saturday mornings, and fourteen days is a long time for an open tray to sit on a bar in a basement. Come September I pull them off the shelf and there is a film of dust settled into the bottom of every one, plus whatever the furnace has been pushing around since spring. Ten minutes with a damp cloth and they are fine again. But I have also left a tray out with chips still in it through one of those two week gaps, and those chips came out dusty and needed wiping before they went on the felt. A lidded tray would have saved me the wiping. It would not have saved me anything else, and I still would not trade the open top for the speed of reaching in.

The honest framing is this: the open top is a deliberate trade for speed of access. You can reach in and grab a stack without opening anything. If you need transport, buy a case with a lid, and use these in the basement. That is exactly what I do.

How the Acrylic Has Actually Held Up

I am a retired machinist, which means I have opinions about plastic that most people do not, and I have broken a lot of things that were not supposed to break. Here is the real report after twelve months.

Before these, I built my own tray in the shop out of a scrap of walnut, because I cannot leave a problem alone. It took most of a Saturday. It looked better than anything you can buy, and it was worse in every way that mattered. The dividers came out too tight, so a stack of clay chips stuck and had to be shaken loose, which is the opposite of what a tray is for. The wood took on a little damp over the winter and the fit got worse. And it weighed enough that setting five of them out on the bar felt like moving furniture. That tray is on a shelf in the shop now, holding drill bits. I use the acrylic.

As for the Brybelly trays, every one is still in one piece except a single tray. That one got knocked off the bar onto the concrete floor and chipped at a corner. It still holds chips. It is ugly now, and I keep it for the bank where nobody looks. So the acrylic is tough enough to survive a fall from bar height and not tough enough to survive it clean. Make of that what you will. A metal tray would have dented instead of chipping.

The rest have picked up fine scratches, the kind you only see when you hold them up to the light. Nothing structural. There is no cracking around the corners, no whitening at the stress points, no warping. They have not yellowed, which surprised me, because cheap clear plastic in a basement usually goes cloudy inside two years. These have not.

The one thing the acrylic does not do well is hide anything. Clear trays show every fingerprint, every bit of chalk dust off a chip, every crumb from the pretzel bowl. If you are the sort who likes gear to look untouched, this will drive you up a wall. A wet paper towel handles it in about ten seconds, so it is a cosmetic complaint, not a functional one.

The Detail That Matters More Than It Should

Chips drop into these trays with a sound I have come to like. There is a soft clack when a stack settles, and because the tray is shallow and open, you can see exactly what you have without lifting anything. My brother-in-law Ray, who has arthritic hands and does not enjoy fiddling with things, can pull a stack out of a tray without fumbling. That is a small thing that turned out to matter more than I expected, and it is the reason I stopped using the trays that came with the case.

The tray also sits flat. No rocking, no wobble on the bar or on the felt. Molded acrylic can come out of a cheap die warped, and I have bought enough warped shop bins to expect it, but all ten of mine sit dead flat on a machinist's granite. I checked, because of course I did.

Five of the ten Brybelly trays equal my entire five hundred chip set. That is the arithmetic that makes the ten pack sensible rather than excessive.

What I Would Change

Two things, and neither is a dealbreaker. First, I would sell these in a twelve pack or a five pack. Ten is a strange number for a home game that seats six, and it is a strange number for a set that runs five hundred chips. Second, I would put a shallow lip on the underside so a loaded tray nests on top of another one without sliding. Right now a stack of loaded trays is a stack of loaded trays, and one nudge sends the lot sideways.

That is the whole complaint list. Two design wishes and one chipped corner. I have owned a lot of poker gear that gave me more to complain about in a month.

Who This Is For

This is for the person who already owns chips and is tired of counting them out of a shared pile. If you host a home game and you set up starting stacks yourself, ten trays turns a fifteen minute chore into a two minute one. It is for the guy who keeps a bank sorted by denomination so he can make change without thinking. It is for anyone with a chip case that has a gap in it, which is most of them.

It is also, quietly, for anyone whose regular players have stiff hands. A tray you can reach into beats a stack you have to pick apart, and it is not close.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you do not own chips. The Brybelly trays hold chips and hold them well, but the trays do not come with any, and there is no version of this purchase that makes sense without a set already on your shelf.

Skip it if your game travels. Open trays in a car, in a bag, in a trunk, are a mess waiting to happen, and a case with a lid is the right answer for that job. Skip it if you need everything to look showroom-new, because clear acrylic is honest about every fingerprint. And skip it if you run a ten seat game with a thousand chips, unless you plan to buy two packs, which is a fine plan but should be a deliberate one.

For everyone else, this is the least interesting purchase in the poker gear catalog and the one you will think about least once it is on the shelf. That is the honest verdict. Not exciting. Solved.