I wanted to share a recent experience that might be interesting for anyone facing the never-ending job of cleaning large chip sets.
I have around 2000 HSI chips used for cash games (basically a two-table cash set, I host one table cash game once a week). Last autumn I started cleaning them by hand, one chip at a time. My pace was roughly 100 chips per hour, so doing everything manually would realistically take dozens of hours.
While doing this over a couple of weeks, I found thechipcleaner.com and noticed the guy behind it lives about 20 minutes from me here in Norway. I contacted him and explained that I had a Paulson cash set. He said he had almost no experience cleaning Paulsons (only done it once before, and those were extremely dirty), so he offered to clean my chips for free so he could test with some newer Paulson chips as well.
We met the following week and spent about an hour running all my chips through his machine. Some chips only needed 1–2 passes, others needed 4–5 passes depending on how dirty they were.
Result:
In the photos I’ll post, about half the chips were hand cleaned by me and half were machine cleaned. You are able to see which where hand cleaned and which where machine cleaned, but the machine-cleaned chips are very acceptable, especially given the massive time savings.
One thing I noticed: if I had taken a quick look at each chip while they were still slightly wet after the machine cycle, it would have been very easy to rub off the few remaining visible stains manually. So a hybrid approach (machine + quick touch-up) might get you very close to perfect with minimal effort.
I failed to take pictures while cleaning my chips, but you can look at how it works on this Facebook post - https://www.facebook.com/groups/825728126247629/permalink/1330201455800291/
I have around 2000 HSI chips used for cash games (basically a two-table cash set, I host one table cash game once a week). Last autumn I started cleaning them by hand, one chip at a time. My pace was roughly 100 chips per hour, so doing everything manually would realistically take dozens of hours.
While doing this over a couple of weeks, I found thechipcleaner.com and noticed the guy behind it lives about 20 minutes from me here in Norway. I contacted him and explained that I had a Paulson cash set. He said he had almost no experience cleaning Paulsons (only done it once before, and those were extremely dirty), so he offered to clean my chips for free so he could test with some newer Paulson chips as well.
We met the following week and spent about an hour running all my chips through his machine. Some chips only needed 1–2 passes, others needed 4–5 passes depending on how dirty they were.
Result:
- Not “factory new” perfect
- But clearly and significantly cleaner than before
- Considering the time spent (~60 minutes for 1000 HSI chips + 1300 ceramic chips), the efficiency was impressive
In the photos I’ll post, about half the chips were hand cleaned by me and half were machine cleaned. You are able to see which where hand cleaned and which where machine cleaned, but the machine-cleaned chips are very acceptable, especially given the massive time savings.
One thing I noticed: if I had taken a quick look at each chip while they were still slightly wet after the machine cycle, it would have been very easy to rub off the few remaining visible stains manually. So a hybrid approach (machine + quick touch-up) might get you very close to perfect with minimal effort.
I failed to take pictures while cleaning my chips, but you can look at how it works on this Facebook post - https://www.facebook.com/groups/825728126247629/permalink/1330201455800291/
