Gifts for Poker Players: Personalised Chip Sets, Cards and Card Guards

If someone you know talks about "the river" and does not mean fishing, they will love a poker gift. The good news for the buyer is that poker kit is wonderfully personalisable: chips, cases, cards and card guards can all carry a name, a date or a private joke.

Start with the chips

A chip set is the centrepiece of any poker gift. The main choices are:

Type	Feel	Personalisation	Best for
Plastic / ABS	Light, clacky	Limited	Casual family games, children's games of skill with no money involved
Clay composite (11.5 to 14 g)	Weighty, casino-like	Custom inlay stickers with names, logos or dates	The classic home-game gift
Ceramic (around 10 g)	Smooth, slightly lighter	Printed edge to edge with any design	Fully custom sets, wedding or birthday designs
True clay	Soft, the feel of real casino chips	Usually via the maker only	Serious collectors; expensive

For size, a 300-chip set suits a game of up to about six players; 500 chips covers eight to ten. Make sure the denominations suit how your recipient plays: tournament players want lots of low-value chips for blinds, while cash-game players want clearly marked values.

Cards: always go plastic

Paper cards bend, mark and stick after a few weeks of regular shuffling, which in a card game is not just annoying but a problem: a marked card is a known card. Plastic playing cards last for years and can be washed. A personalised deck, with a name or photo printed on the backs, adds the finishing touch; buy two decks in contrasting colours so one can be shuffled while the other is dealt. Our guide to printed gifts has more on personalised cards and the history of card printing in Britain.

The card guard: the most personal poker gift

A card guard (or card protector) is a small weighted object a player sets on top of their two face-down hole cards in Texas Hold'em, so they cannot be mucked by accident or swept away by the dealer. Players are superstitious about them, and many use the same one for years. That makes an engraved card guard the most personal poker gift of all: a heavy brass, steel or silver disc engraved with initials, a nickname or the date of a famous win. Coins, lucky charms and miniature trophies all serve, but a custom guard says "this is my seat". See how engraving works for which metals engrave best.

Other kit worth giving

• A dealer button: engraved with the host's name or the "house" logo.
• A table-top felt: turns a dining table into a poker table; some can be printed with a name.
• An aluminium or wooden case: with an engraved plate, for carrying the set to games.
• A shuffler and a timer: for tournament hosts.
• Hand-ranking cards: a printed card for beginners showing royal flush down to high card.
• Glassware: a set of tumblers engraved with players' initials (see our glassware guide).

Hosting a home game: what the law says

In Great Britain, a poker game among friends at home counts as "private gaming" and is legal, provided it is played in a private home on a domestic occasion, nobody is charged a fee to play and the host does not take a cut (a "rake") from the pots. The stakes are a matter for the players. That is why the best home-game gifts are about hosting: good chips, decent cards and snacks on a board engraved "Full House" from our home accessories guide.

A short history of poker in Britain

Poker was an American game for most of its history, but it found a big British audience at the turn of the millennium, when television began showing tournaments with cameras that revealed the players' hole cards. Online poker and big-money TV events turned Texas Hold'em into a home-game staple in the 2000s, and the monthly game round the dining table has been a fixture in many friendship groups ever since. Plenty of those groups started with somebody's birthday present: a chip set in an aluminium case.

Gift ideas by budget

Budget	Ideas
Under £20	Two decks of plastic cards, a dealer button, an engraved keyring card guard
£20 to £60	A 300-chip clay-composite set in a case, an engraved brass card guard
£60 to £150	A 500-chip custom-inlay set, table felt, personalised cards
£150 and up	A fully printed ceramic set, a folding poker table, tickets to a live tournament

For a bigger celebration, turn the gift into a party: our casino-night party ideas add roulette and blackjack to the poker table.

Written by the Ribbon & Tag editors.