Best Poker Snacks

  

Playing poker isn’t as easy as you may think it is, especially if you are playing at even a semi-professional level. If you want to play at your best, you need to feed your body properly to keep up both your mental and physical stamina. Here we have a list of some handy foods that can help to improve your game, both at home and at the tournament. You bring the friends, decorations and drinks. We've got the crowd-pleasing appetizers covered. 'This was a lovely appetizer. The sausage worked well in the dish and I will definitely be making these again.' “I wanted to create a fun, spicy appetizer for a party I was having in the middle of. 500 Count Ace Casino Poker Set - 14 Gram Clay Composite Chips with Aluminum Case, Playing Cards, & Dealer Button for Texas Hold’em, Blackjack, & Casino Games by Brybelly 4.5 out of 5 stars 250 $79.99. Find quick & easy Poker Game Night 2020 recipes & menu ideas, search thousands of recipes & discover cooking tips from the ultimate food resource for home cooks, Epicurious.

Poker night is more than just a night of playing card games. We all know that it’s a night of fun with the boys and girls while sharing delicious food and drinks.

When it comes to food for poker night, it’s easy to fall into the trap of serving the usual salty, fatty, or sugary fare that ends up on the table.

In most cases, most people won’t mind. However, if you want to have that one poker night to remember or become the undisputed “best poker night host”, you’d better upgrade your poker game night snacks.

Lucky for you, we are here to help.

Food for Poker Night Recipes

We have scoured the internet for the best game night snack ideas so you don’t have to. Don’t worry these recipes won’t require the skills of a gourmet chef since they’re relatively easy to prepare. However, you can trust that they’re downright delicious.

Without further ado…

Philly Cheesesteak Nachos (Prep Time: 20 mins.)

When it comes to poker game snacks, it’s hard to go wrong with serving nachos. Upgrade the traditional nachos by combining it with a fan-favorite sandwich, the Philly Cheesesteak.

Check out this bound-to-be-favorite nacho recipe from All Recipes:

Ingredients:

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1/2 large onion, diced
  • 1/2 pound shaved rib-eye, chopped
  • 1 (18 ounce) package restaurant-style tortilla chips
  • 1 (8 fl. oz.) jar processed cheese spread (such as Kraft® Cheez Whiz®)
  • 2 fresh jalapeno peppers, sliced

Directions:

  • Heat olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add onion; cook and stir until softened, 5 to 10 minutes. Transfer to a bowl. Cook rib-eye in the same skillet, stirring occasionally, until browned and juices have evaporated, 5 to 10 minutes. Stir onion back into the skillet.
  • Place a handful of tortilla chips on each plate. Spoon rib-eye and onion mixture over chips; top with cheese spread and jalapeno slices.

If jalapenos are not available, you can use pickled jalapenos as a substitute.

Chicago Italian Beef Sandwich (Prep and Cook Time: 3 hrs. 40 mins.)

If you want to serve something with more bite, this recipe for the Chicago Italian Beef Sandwich from none other than Guy Fieri of The Food Network fame should get the job done.

Be sure to start preparing and cooking earlier because this recipe takes a lot of time.

Ingredients:

  • 4 pounds, top round with fat cap
  • 3 tablespoons Italian seasoning
  • 2 tablespoons salt
  • 2 tablespoons fresh cracked black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon cayenne
  • 1 tablespoon paprika
  • 1 teaspoon red chili flakes
  • 3 tablespoons bacon fat, or canola oil
  • 3 yellow onions, chopped
  • 1 cup garlic, whole cloves
  • 1/2 cup red wine
  • 3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 cup beef stock
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 6 sourdough baguette rolls halved, toasted
  • 1 cup chopped giardiniera vinaigrette vegetables
  • 1 cup jarred red sweet peppers

Directions:

  • Rub meat with dry ingredients, cover and refrigerate for 2 to 3 hours.
  • Preheat oven to 275 degrees F.
  • Add meat to a roasting pan with bacon fat, add onions and garlic, sauté for 15 minutes, deglaze with wine, and add Worcestershire sauce, beef stock, and bay leaves.
  • Place roasting pan in the oven and cook for 3 hours, uncovered, or until an instant-read thermometer registers 135 degrees F in the center. Remove, let cool, then slice very thin.
  • Cool broth in roasting pan and remove the fat that rises to the top. Strain.
  • Reheat the broth, and add the sliced meat. Place some meat on each toasted roll, ladle with some broth and top with giardiniera vegetables and red peppers.

Slow Cooker Ranch Chicken Tacos (Prep and Cook Time: 4 hrs. 15 mins.)

This is not the tacos that we all know and love. Instead of the ever-familiar salsa, we will be using ranch.

This recipe from Who Needs a Cape is guaranteed to be a hit with your poker buddies.

Poker

Ingredients:

  • 3-4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
  • ½ cup water
  • 2 tablespoons taco seasoning (or 1 packet of taco seasoning)
  • 1 packet of ranch seasoning
  • 8-10 small taco-sized flour tortillas
  • ranch dressing, to taste
  • 2-3 cups of cole slaw, without sauce
  • ½ red onion, thinly sliced
  • ¼ cup cilantro leaves, roughly chopped
  • Optional: shredded cheese, diced avocado, diced tomato

Instructions:

  • Place chicken breasts in slow cooker. Pour in water, then sprinkle chicken with taco seasoning and ranch seasoning. Cover and cook on high for 3-4 hours or on low for 6-7 hours.
  • About 20 minutes before serving, use a slotted spoon to transfer chicken to a bowl, shred with 2 forks, then return to slow cooker and stir.
  • When ready to serve, fill tortillas with shredded chicken, then drizzle with ranch dressing.
  • Top with slaw, red onions, cilantro, and any additional desired toppings such as shredded cheese, avocado, or tomatoes. Serve immediately.

Feeling Hungry Yet?

All of these poker snacks are guaranteed to be delicious and will make your guests ask for more. These foods for poker night recipes are very easy to prepare and cook, and the ingredients are all easy to get.

What do you think of these recipes? Do you have a favorite poker night snack recipe? Feel free to share in the comments!

For more fun articles and tips about card games, visit CardGameInfo for a great collection of card game blogs.

Table Of Contents

The age-old saying goes something like this: 'The guy who invented gambling was brilliant, but the guy who invented chips was a genius.'

The reason behind this saying is that chips remove from gambling the real world of money.

Gamblers tend to have very short memories. Once they purchase chips, they easily forget their real world value, making losses on the green felt seem relatively painless — at least until they go to cash out.

Home poker has largely embraced this concept.

Games that used to be played with silver change and paper money are now often played with the best poker chips.

If you're hosting a home game, you may well be considering the purchase of a cool poker chip set.

The best poker chip sets contain:

  • A set of 500 poker chips
  • Poker chips in three or four colors for different denominations
  • A deal button
  • A Big Blind button
  • A Small Blind button
  • Two decks of French cards

A poker chip set for home like this should be enough for your typical game of one to two tables.

Finding the best poker chips for your home games depends on your tastes and your budget.

Here's a summary of what's out there to help you find just the right chips for your game. To get a really good sense of all of your options, I suggest that you check out the online stores that specialize in poker supplies.

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Cheap Poker Chips: Plastic Chips

At the very lowest end of the chip market are the very lightweight, 2 gram or so, thin plastic poker chips that many of us played with as kids or in high school and college.

They are typically sold in packs of 100, often in red, white, and blue.

These are the chips available for purchase in nearly every large pharmacy and in groceries, right in the same area as the packs of playing cards.

They'll run you $2.50 to $3.95 or so. If you look around you might find a really inexpensive version of them in the dollar stores — selling for $1.00.

You can buy plastic poker chips online, too. In these case, these are your best options:

  • 100 Poker Chips by RINCO(Red and Blue)
  • 600 Poker Chips by U.S. Toy Co.(Red, White, Blue)
Best poker game snacks

These cheap plastic poker chips are fine in a pinch, or with young or inexperienced players who have never been to a public poker room or casino.

But they feel and sound so much cheaper than what you'll find in a casino or other public poker room, that they may be inadequate for your more serious players.

Imitation Clay Poker Chips

One step up, and what I first purchased back in the early '90s when I started playing in casinos around the United States, are solidly colored, imitation clay poker chips.

These poker chips for home games are made of heavy plastic weighing 8 grams a chip or so.

Cool imitation clay poker chips for home games are generally marketed as 'super diamond chips.'

They can be purchased online for between $.06 and $.10 per chip, and sell in 'sleeves' of 25 single color chips.

These are the best poker chips of this kind:

These imitation clay poker chips are perfectly adequate for your home game, especially if you are running multi-table tournaments and want to be able to afford a lot of chips for a relatively little amount of money.

Since they lack any striping, spotting or design, some players might not prefer them.

But I've used mine in large tournaments and in home games for 25 years and never had a complaint (at least not to my face).

Clay Composite Chips

Slightly more expensive, and by far the most common chips that are sold to poker players today, are the metal filled, clay composite chips, with a myriad of different designs, strips, and spots.

Clay poker chips are usually sold as part of chip set, including an inexpensive aluminium carrying case.

These can also be purchased in sleeves of 25 from some companies, but are more typically sold in units of 500 or 1,000 as part of a poker chip set for home games.

These clay composite chips come in a large range of prices.

The 500-chip sets, for example, can be purchased online for anywhere from $39 or so up to $300 (not including shipping), based on the quality, design, and weight of the chip. Each chip weighs anywhere from 11 to 14 grams.

If you are looking for the best poker chips and you want to top chip set for home games, pick one of these. You can't go wrong with any of them.

I've noticed that at the very bottom of that price range, the clay composite chips tend to be of unacceptably poor quality.

I once purchased a 1,000-chip set for $90 and paid $45 to ship them (they're heavy, and shipping is generally expensive). The chips arrived with 20 red chips equaling the height of only 19 white chips.

They had many other defects in them as well.

I had to send them back for a refund — and got stuck with one way of the shipping.

If you are ordering these metal-filled chips, then, I recommend you order no cheaper chip than the ones selling for about $150 for 1,000.

Customized Ceramic Poker Chips

The next step up are the Ceramic poker chips that sell for about $.40-$.75 or so each.

Nevada Jacks is the most popular brand of these chips. These also come in sets of 500 or 1,000.

Best poker night snacks

A nice poker set of the best home poker chips in ceramic is known for their brilliant colors and sharp detail.

These are the best poker chips to buy. They are not metal filled, and they don't make the metal clanging sound when they bump together.

Players rave about them.

The most expensive, regularly produced variety of chips are the casino-quality clay chips made by the Paulson company, typified by the Top Hat and Cane design.

These chips cost roughly $1.25 a chip, or from $1,100 to $1,400 for a set of 1,000.

If you want your home poker chips to be just like those in a casino and you don't mind paying for them, these are the ones for you.

The best ceramic poker chips for home games are:

  • Brybelly 500 Count Nevada Jack Poker Set - 10 Gram Premium Casino Grade Ceramic Chips with Aluminum Case

There is another option to consider.

Some chip manufacturers will customize your chips with your own design.

These can come as a 'hot stamped' imprint, as a printed label that is permanently affixed to the chip, or in the case ceramic chips the design can be built into the chip itself.

Prices for this option vary widely, so shop around if this interests you.

Poker Chip Cases

Keep in mind that you'll almost certainly want a case in which to store and transport your poker chip ser. There are a few options in this department as well.

The most common are these thin aluminium or vinyl attaché cases.

These are most frequently made with room for 500 chips, and a few extra spaces for cards. There are also chip cases that accommodate 250, 350, 750, and 1,000 chips.

They sell for between $20-$50 and can vary some in quality, though it's usually next to impossible to tell from the pictures which ones are more sturdily made. Look for reinforcements in the corners.

Also, the 1,000 capacity chip case, when filled with chips, will be too heavy for some to easily carry around.

You might be better off ordering two 500s instead. There is also, now, a 2,000-chip case that comes with wheels for easier transportation.

If you run tournaments or move your game from place to place, you might be tempted to get it, but I don't recommend it.

From everything I've read and heard, it is not built with sufficient sturdiness to survive much use. Tales of handles and wheels falling off upon first use are a legend.

There are a few other chip case options. One is a clear lucite chip case. It is built for 1,000 chips, stacked in chip racks of 100 each, and sells for about $50.

This is very useful if you run tournaments and want to easily have your chips organized for simple distribution to a large group of people.

Snacks

It's also extremely sturdy, easy to stack, and doesn't dent, scratch, or otherwise deteriorate from regular use (unlike the aluminium and vinyl cases described above). It's what I use, and I recommend it highly.

Finally, for those who care about how your chip cases look, there are some very nice wooden storage boxes. They tend to be cube-shaped, come in a dark finish, and have shiny, small metal handles, one on each side of the box.

Best Poker Snacks

They aren't easy to carry, and so would be awkward and inappropriate if you transported your chips regularly.

But they do look nice sitting on a shelf. They sell for about $50 separately, but like all other chip cases, they are often included in the price of a chip set.

Other Recommendations

I would immediately rule out the very cheap plastic poker chips and the very cheapest of the metal filled chips.

Beyond that, however, I don't think there is really much of a difference in how your poker-playing guests will react to the chips.

I've played in home games with the best ceramic poker chips and with Paulson's. They were beautiful to behold.

But I noticed no one really seemed to care.

I've found that poker players are typically so completely engaged in how much they were up or down that the look of their chips was the last thing they cared about.

That being said, you might care about that, and might take great pride in having a truly beautiful set or chips that remind you of what you play with at the nearest casino.

One last item to consider — there are very few brick-and-mortar stores that sell a wide variety of poker chips (The Gambler's General Store in Las Vegas is a great exception).

Amazon, Target, Walmart and a few other retail chains may have boxed sets for sale, but the chips themselves will still be hidden.

That means for the most part, you'll probably be looking online at an image of a chip — not the real thing — when you contemplate a purchase.

For that reason, I recommend that before you buy a complete set of chips, especially an expensive one, that you either purchase or ask the company to send you for free some sample chips.

Best Poker Night Snacks

Catalogs, computer screens, and the like don't really do a chip justice. For that you'll need to see, hold, and use the chip itself.

Sure, it may cost you $5 or $10 to get a small sample set of chips from the manufacturer. But that's a much less costly option than ordering chips you don't want and having to return them.

About the Author

Ashley Adams has been playing poker for 50 years and writing about it since 2000. He is the author of hundreds of articles as well as Winning 7-Card Stud (Kensington 2003). He is also the host of poker radio show House of Cards. See www.houseofcardsradio.com for broadcast times, stations, and podcasts.

Best Poker Snacks

This article was originally written by Ashley Adams in August 2016. Last update: December 2019.

Photos: 'Ready for poker,' Laura, CC BY 2.0; 'Poker Chips,' Indi Samarajiva, CC BY 2.0; 'Poker XII,' Bastian Greshake, CC BY-SA 2.0; 'New custom ceramic chip set,' BigMikeSndTch, CC BY 2.0; 'Poker anyone?' uzi978, CC BY-SA 2.0;.

Best Poker Night Snacks

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Best Poker Game Snacks

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