[puzzlemonkey]

Manufacturer: Brands On Sale's American Oak Poker Chip Chest
Retailer(s): Brands On Sale
Material: Wood
Price $199.00
Member Review by: Puzzlemonkey

Brands on Sale's American Oak poker chip chest is a 1200-chip capacity container for your chips. It features 3 drawers, each of which holds 400 chips in four wooden 100-chip trays. A top compartment holds additional accessories. All of the drawers are felt-lined. A single latch with a pin system secures the top compartment and a face plate which latches closed in front of the drawers. Made in China.

Capacity

1200 chips (100 per rack, 4 racks per drawer), plus several decks of cards, a shuffler, or other accessories. Actually, if you stick a couple of Chipco racks in the top, you can get another two hundred chips in the top section and still have room for the cards and buttons. (CaptLego's setup below shows his fifty-plus Egyptian plaques, over a hundred octagons, and a dozen decks of cards.)

Dimensions

17" wide x 14" tall x 11" deep. Weight: around 27 pounds.

Looks

The case is impressive-looking—it's quite large and imposing. The light oak finish is uniform if a little rough, and the stainless-steel hardware fittings are unimposing and unremarkable. A recessed door pull on the front panel gives it a touch of class. The black felt lining in the top compartment and in each of the drawers offsets the wood nicely. The felt is also well-applied, with straight edges throughout. Even in the subdivided top compartment, the felt covers all the surfaces it's supposed to with only the smallest of visible seams. With the top open and the drawers pulled out, the case is quite a sight to behold—sometimes I'm reluctant to close it up. For someone with enough room, this could almost be used as a sort of "practical display case."

Quality

The case feels solid and sturdy, and appears to be made of actual wood throughout, except for the bottoms of the drawers, which are some kind of particle board. The felt lining is well-attached. Overall, the craftsmanship is good. The materials are of average quality—the wood is nothing special, but it's reasonably well-finished, and uses nice solid tongue-in-groove construction throughout. The reinforcement and trim hardware is solidly attached. The drawer bottoms are stapled and screwed to the wooden frames, and seem well-attached and would never be seen in the course of normal use. The drawers slide smoothly, although leaving them three-quarters of the way open with a full load of chips inside is likely to damage the plastic runners inside the case—they appear to be just glued into position. The latch and faceplate-locking mechanism is quite nifty and works well. The chip trays are real wood and sturdy as well. Lifting the chest by the handles feels safe and secure—the chest appears to have been adapted from a tool chest and seems able to handle the weight of 1200-plus chips.

Reviewers Comments

The American Oak Poker Chip Chest retails at $199.00 from Brands On Sale, which, as far as I can tell, is the only place it's available. I bought mine through Brands on Sale on eBay—try a search for "American Oak Poker." I paid the starting price of $129.00 for it, but I had to wait through several auctions before I landed one without competing bids.

First of all, this is a chip chest—think of it more as a piece of furniture than as a carrying case. With a full load of 1200 chips plus accessories, my case weighed in at around 62 pounds and it is quite cumbersome. It's likely to stay in one place most of the time, and you won't feel like carrying it from home game to home game unless you want to look like you're delivering the gold shipment from Carson City. (Think lugging a heavy box of books on moving day, not carrying an overloaded suitcase.) As a chest, though, it's fairly elegant and quite functional. You can view, arrange, and move your chips by the tray of 100 or drawer of 400 quite easily. The upper compartments will easily hold 8 decks of cards, your dealer buttons, and a few other accessories. (I have two racks of 100 Chipcos in the top compartment, and still have room for my cards and buttons.)

I have two small quibbles with the chest: One is that the wooden chip racks have just enough play around the stacks of 25 chips in each row that the chips shift around quite a bit—it's easy to knock them out when removing or replacing the racks in the drawers. (This is true with my Chipcos and cheap composite sets, at least—other types of chips may fit differently.)

The other is that there are no feet or pads of any kind on the bottom. Sliding this across a table or floor would result in some gouging from the screws on the steel corner hardware being in direct contact with the surface the chest is sitting on. This can be easily solved by a trip to the hardware store, of course.

Overall, the chest is a good way to store a full set of chips plus extras, keeping all of your poker supplies right at hand without having to store an aluminum case or similar storage solution "in plain sight."

Case Images

CaptLegos Egyptians in the Brands on Sale 1200 Chip Case


The lock mechanism—the two pins sticking out on top are pushed down by the case's lid. They slide into the holes on the faceplate, locking it shut.