I own some 36mm paulsons. I haven’t played an actual game with them yet, but I’ve spent plenty of time shuffling them and fooling around with them. I got used to the smaller size pretty quickly. 3mm equals .12 inches, so we’re not talking about a huge difference.
I assume casinos choose these smaller chips for tournament sets because they were cheaper? And solids - again, I don’t think anybody prefers solid chips; they’re just cheaper. In fact, if you look around, you’ll notice that the vast majority of casino tournament sets are solids.
How do they hold up? I haven’t read any reviews or reports on this, but there’s no reason to believe these chips would have a shorter life span than contemporary Paulson
RHC 39mm chips (which, in the contest of the typical home game, means they’ll probably last forever.)
Here’s a 36mm chip, on top of a 39mm chip:
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