Casino staff frequently reference chips as "cheques," which is of French ancestry. Technically, there is a difference between a cheque and a chip. A cheque is a chip with a denomination printed on it and is always worth the amount of the printed denomination. Chips, on the other hand, don’t have values written on them and the value is defined by the table. For example, in a poker table, the croupier may value white chips as $1 and blue chips as $10; whereas, in a roulette game, the croupier might define white chips as $0.25 and blue chips at $2. A further example, the cheap red, white, and blue poker chips you purchase at the department store for your weekly poker game are called "chips" due to the fact that they don’t have denominations written on them.
When you plop your cash down and hear the dealer say, "Cheque change only," he’s just informing the boxman that a new competitor wish to exchange money for chips or more correctly cheques, and that the cash sitting on the table is not in play. Money plays in most casinos, so if you put a five dollar bill down on the Pass Line just prior to the player tosses the pair of dice and the croupier doesn’t exchange your cash for chips, your cash is "live" and "in play."
In reality, in live craps games, we compete with with cheques, and not chips. Occasionally, a player will walk up to the the table, drop a 100 dollar cheque, and say to the dealer, "Cheque change." It’s fun to pretend to be a new player and ask the dealer, "Hey, I’m a beginner to this game, what’s a cheque?" Most of the time, their comical answers will amuse you.
This entry was posted on January 22, 2010, 12:22 pm and is filed under Craps. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.