Gifts for Poker Players: What a Home Game Is Actually Missing

The poker player in your life almost certainly owns chips and cards already. What they probably do not own is anything that makes the game feel like it is being played properly — and that is a far better gift than more of what they have.

Walk into most home games and the table is bare wood, the deck is paper and soft at the corners, and the dealer button was lost two years ago and replaced with a bottle cap. Every one of those is fixable, cheaply, and nobody fixes them for themselves.

The best gift: a table topper

A poker table topper turns a dining or kitchen table into a card room for the evening. Felt over a rubber back: cards slide instead of sticking, chips stack, and nothing skitters off the edge. It rolls away into a cupboard between games.

It is the single gift most likely to be used every week, and the one a regular host is least likely to have bought — because it feels like furniture, and nobody buys themselves furniture for a hobby.

Measure the table first. The six-seat topper is 47 × 24 inches and fits an ordinary dining table. The eight-seat one is 71 × 35 inches, which is properly tournament-sized and needs a big table to sit flat. Buy the one that fits the table they actually play on, not the one that sounds more impressive.

A plastic deck

Card rooms do not play with paper. Paper decks soften, mark and stick together within a few sessions, and a soft deck slows every deal. An all-plastic deck shuffles the same on the five-hundredth hand as on the first, and survives the drink that always gets spilled.

A jumbo-index deck is worth knowing about here. In most card games big indices read as a joke about eyesight; in poker they are common, because players check their hole cards by lifting a corner a fraction, and a larger index is readable from that small lift.

A dealer button

The thing every home game loses. A weighty acrylic one stays put when the table gets lively; a set of four adds the small and big blind markers, which settles the argument about whose turn it is to post.

What not to buy

Ten chips as the whole present. Our clay chip sets come in tens, deliberately — they are for someone who already owns a set and is short of a denomination, or wants a few heavy chips to use as card guards. A full home game needs several hundred. Ten chips on their own is a disappointing parcel.

Anything branded with a tournament or a casino. Licensed merchandise is rarely what it claims to be when it is cheap, and a serious player will know.

A novelty "poker set" in a silver case. Usually featherweight plastic chips and two paper decks. It looks generous and gets played with once.

Shipping

Everything ships from our supplier overseas, and we do not quote delivery dates because we would be guessing. If it is for a birthday or the holidays, order well before you think you need to.