Hey,
@Nick@TPS. Not sure where to post my review, so I'll just do it here. Feel free to use it elsewhere if you'd like. I could also move to a standalone thread if that's what's best for you.
NOTE: I'd never seen any SSC before this, so I don't have much to compare against. I have, however, played poker for a long time and used tables of varying quality.
Material
At first glance, I love the way the material looks. Clean lines, big blocks of color, easily distinguishable suits. It's slightly reflective, and I like the way it picks up lower light. I feel like it might stand out in the typical, low-light poker room. It also seems fairly durable. It's thick material, not nearly as supple as I would have expected. I think this might prove beneficial once it's stretched over a playing surface.
My only complaint about the material is that I don't love how it feels on my hands. My skin catches on it, like some clothes will do if your hands are dry. Would be interested to know if anyone else feels that. I want the material to look nice, and it does, but I also want it to feel nice, as my fingertips will be scratching against it for hours at a time.
Hard to judge how the material would actually play, given the size of the samples. I tried to pitch some cards onto them, but they're just too small. Maybe someone else has some insight here? Is it possible that cards would catch on the material like my skin does? I doubt it. My guess is that cards would slide really nicely across the table.
Color
The colors are really cool. Nick sent ten different samples, and they are all pretty distinct visually, even though the same pattern appears on all of them. Most samples are two-tone, the named color and black. On some of these the color makes up the suits and the aisles running between them, with the black just creating negative space around the suits, and on other samples this is flipped, with the symbols and aisles black and the negative space colored. Finally, a subset of the samples contain no black, and instead just use a darker version of the main color to fill the negative space. The Polo Green color takes this to the furthest extreme, with yellow symbols surrounded by green. I actually really dig this one.
Some of these colors are BRIGHT. Really really vivid. Jackpot, Midnight Blue, and Trump Card all really stand out. I'm personally more drawn to the less extreme samples, but I think the bright ones could be great statements in a poker room.
I'll rank the colors below in order of most to least favorite. This is obviously entirely subjective.
1. Charcoal
2. Reverse Platinum
3. Polo Green
4. Persian Blue
5. Reverse Chocolate
6. Platinum
7. Trump Card
8. Jackpot
9. Midnight Blue
10. Bronze
Misc and Suggestion
One thing I noticed is that the samples are directional, meaning that the bottom of all the suits faces the same direction. That means to half of the table, all symbols will be upside down. I'm 90% sure this isn't a problem, and I only noticed because I'm scrutinizing, but still, I noticed. Maybe inverting row by row makes sense?
The back of all the patterns is always the same, and it's actually really cool. It's just a matte black-on-black. It's too rough to the touch (obviously), but the aesthetic is nice. Maybe an offering like this would make sense?