Poker chips are in existence right from the olden days when the poker game started to be a common betting game involving money.  They have been around from the beginning of the 18th century when the money part of the betting was replaced with representative poker chips to avoid theft of the money put in bet.

Originally poker chips were designed to be with clay bits and later as time progressed, artists painted the poker chips with the color of their choice.  And slowly poker chips that were just bits of burnt clay were painted and designed to look attractive.  After some time each color in the poker chips was a representative element of a denomination, but since all players did not play high stakes, the player started to allot their own value to each color chips per their preference with respect to the color of the poker chips used.

Poker chips therefore were made available in different colors with denominations and also some poker chips were made available without denominations.  At some point in time, it was professional for casinos to use poker chips with denominations, but as time progressed casinos used colored chips without denomination and the value of the stakes varied in each table.

The durability of clay was very less in casinos because of the widespread handling of the poker chips by different kinds of players.  All casinos did not afford to replace their stakes so often; this gave rise to the poker chips that are made up of variable range of materials giving the same kind of durability and weight to the poker chips like the clay chips.  Though there have been metal chips and equally heavy weight poker chips from other materials the love for clay poker chips still stay unbeaten.

The interesting thing that is happening with poker chips is the personalization of poker chips.  Personalization of poker chips is being done by many methods.  Some casinos personalize their chips by printing their logo in it.  Tournaments personalize the chips used by using labels like WPT, WSOP etcetera and also in some cases poker pros are honored by having their pictures printed in the poker chips.

With the demand for poker chips with celebrity poker pros being more, most of the clubs are trying to make a business out of it, by getting an exclusive copyright to print celebrity photos on their brand of poker chips.  Everything is becoming monetized and so are poker chips and copyrights kind of thing.