I have told the story of my beginnings in poker many times before... and how that .25/.50 NLHE, $20 buy-in game with slugged plastic dice chips lead me to Chiptalk. We had a player that liked to hoard quarters. He loved to line his edge of the table with stacks of twenty five cent chips ten high, one row, then two... then three if he was running good. Felting him was like hitting the jackpot on a one arm bandit in days of ole.
Barrels upon barrels of assorted chips would get pushed my way. I would separate the quarters from the dollars and whatever few fives found their way into the pot. I would count what I had dragged in as I stacked, 20 quarters, four ones, twenty more quarters, three ones, another twenty quarters, three more ones... oh, and a five! Goddamn... another twenty quarters, five more ones. Fuck me! More quarters!
After taking time between hands to stack all the slippery bastards, what would happen? Again and again? With the slightest brush of my arm or the smallest knock of the table or a cough from the player opposite of me... the neatly stacked barrels would spill over into a huge heap, waiting for me to re-stack them.
So here I am years later spending thousands of dollars on "clay" poker chips for no other reason than to avoid having to re-stack plastic slugged chips valued at a quarter.