Distinguish your home game

Now that poker has hit prime time, there’s nothing worse than inviting your buddies over for a poker game and then rolling out the old fold-up card table and carousal full of plastic poker chips in your wood-paneled basement. That may have flown a few years ago when nobody really knew any better, but today it’s different. Poker players have tasted the good life, and there’s no going back. Even casual players are getting used to playing on plush poker tables and using real casino chips at the casinos, and more and more in upscale home games.

Nonetheless, when the average person started seeing the big poker games on TV and decided it was time to dress up their own game, they did what the average person does. They went out and bought the first “real-looking” chips they could get their hands on for the cheapest price they could find. Throw in a folding table top covered with cheap felt and they think they’ve created their own private Caesar’s Palace in their basement.

You can hardly blame a person really. Few people anticipated just how big poker was going to get. Even the casinos were blindsided by the pace at which poker took center stage. Now they’re literally redesigning their casino floors to accommodate more tables, and much more glamorous poker rooms. The high-rollers are coming, as well as the celebrities. The poker world’s infrastructure, long limping by as a loss-leader in many casinos, had to shed its dingy back room atmosphere almost overnight.

The class of home games has gone through a similar transformation across the country (and around the world) over the past few years, except the vast majority of home games did it on a $150 budget, which gets you precisely a $150 make-over. Not much.

So what happens next is what always happens next. It is what separates one group from another, the winners from the losers. The average person makes peace with his plight of mediocrity. Having invested $150 in chips, he decides he’ll make do with what he’s got because he can’t stomach the fact that he wasted his money. And this is what the vast majority of the ordinary poker games will be like for a long time to come.

The other group, being a somewhat extraordinary breed, either skipped the impulse to buy the cheap stuff right off the get go, or just simply knows when to admit their error in judgment and call their $150 purchase a sunk cost and move on to bigger and better things. Nobody likes to waste money, but there are two ways to look at this predicament, and the winner always sees the apparent opportunity. Now, if the vast majority of poker games are going to be using this crap for a long time to come, then for a relatively small investment one could really distinguish their home game from the masses.

What’s your move?

Shop for some nice chips.