One of these things is not like the others

Saturday night at the Palms there was a young man at the far end of the table with what looked like an unsuually small stack when I sat down. Only when he played a hand by tossing in a green $25 chip did I realize that he had a lot more money in front of him that I had realized, because some of what appeared to be $1 chips were actually $25s. I don't think I had seen $25 chips in play at the Palms before, so this was the first time I became aware of what a problem it is.

You see, their $1 chips are a white background with blue-green decoration, and a blue-green edge. The $25 are green and white, but with a solid medium-green edge. The edge colors are far, far too similar. Even after becoming aware of the problem, I could not tell from a table-length away which chips in this guy's stack were $1s and which were $25s. With a chip flat on the table, it was not too difficult to distinguish them (though a glance might still mislead), but in a stack viewed from the side, they're nearly identical.

After a while this guy moved down to my end of the table. I gradually became aware that he was deliberately inducing confusion. If he won a pot with more than a few red $5 chips in it, he would go to the cashier's desk and trade five of them for another $25 chip.

Maybe he has a serious aversion to red. Maybe he just likes to have a physically short stack. But I'm pretty suspicious that his goal was to eventually trap somebody unaware. When he had a monster, he could move all in, and hope that an opponent would see his stack as mostly consisting of $1 chips, and decide to call with a marginal hand, only to be informed that there was actually something like $300 to be matched.

The best thing the Palms could do about this would be to get rid of either the $1 or the $25 chips, and replace them with a color that won't easily be mistaken for another denomination. But they could accomplish the same thing--that is, preventing the kind of mistake that I think this guy was trying to induce--by simply making it a poker room rule that the $25 chips don't play. If somebody brings them to the table, they have to be changed for reds.

In retrospect, I think that what I should have done was ask the floor man to require, at a minimum, that this player keep his $25 chips in a separate stack from the $1s and $5s. Instead, he was constantly shuffling them, keeping them thoroughly intermixed.

There's also a warning for all players in this observation: Don't assume you can tell at a glance how much money is behind an all-in bet; always ask for the dealer to count it, unless you're certain that you're willing to put your whole stack in. You may avoid a nasty surprise. If you don't look closely, you may miss the fact that there are higher-denomination chips ($25 or even $100) lurking quietly among the expected $1s and $5s.