Pink Chips

The lore of the pink chip dates back to a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and possibly even earlier then that when it was considered completely socially acceptable to play at the Tropicana in Atlantic City. The pink chip games in those days were notoriously some of the easiest games around in an era prior to the poker boom when the game had not yet been widely popularized and fucking nobody played no limit hold'em. All of the action was at the limit tables: limit hold'em, limit Omaha hi/lo, or some repulsive stud variants, and when it came to action, nothing topped the pink chip games. People would stumble in from off of the beach or out of their cars, buy a couple racks of pink, and cheerfully watch as it disappeared a bet or two at a time to people who could actually do math. Anyone with so much as the slightest understanding of limit poker could and did make money hand over fist. So whenever anyone hears a rumor today that a pink chip game might come together, we all start salivating like the fucking Pavlovian dogs we are and make our way to the casino with dollar signs flashing in our eyeballs, imagining ourselves counting our profits in the cashout line at the end of the night like Scrooge Shitgobbling McDuck. This mentality has become so pervasive that it has bled into the younger generations; players who couldn't have possibly played in those first pink chip games even with the best fake ID money could buy will gleefully put their names on the list if they see a pink chip game running or an interest list on the Bravo (myself included). Even though the pink chip games today aren't even close to as good as they were in their prime, we still love them and will find any excuse we can to sit in one if it's available. Give me 7.50/15 LO/8 over NL any goddamned day.

But we love pink chips for more than just the pink chip limit games. Even when we're sitting in our regular games, we still have a collective boner for the pink chip and the people who bring them to the tables when they sit down. This is because a pink chip usually means that the player who has it came from the blackjack tables and is buying in with whatever remained after getting brutalized when the dealer revealed that the card underneath that 5 was somehow a 6, and then drew the inevitable paint card right before he let out an unconvincing apology to the table as everyone's money was swiftly placed in the rack. This player gazes ruefully downward at his pink chip, a reminder that he'd actually hit blackjack at some point earlier and maybe even been ahead for the night before this incident took place. "Fuck it! I'm going to play poker. I can win there," he says. But alas, he rarely succeeds. He's already tilted from spewing in the pit, so the chances he can play anything resembling acceptable poker are quite slim. He tells himself he'll focus and calm down, that he'll feel better once he gets AA and it holds up. It never occurs to him that whatever money he brings to the poker room is more or less already gone. It becomes ours. And we fucking love it when their money becomes ours.