GQ December 2000 page 112. Article title "Elements of Style" by John Hodgman. Up your ante. Custom-made poker chips elevate the game from cards to casino. Every other Thursday, I play poker with some friends. The game moves from apartment to apartment. We throw some felt over the dining-room table; we drink and talk and joke and play cards. Male bonding at its most benign and most pleasant. Let me say this now. I have no illusion that such evenings are cool in any way. To even suggest that our game of poker, of all the countless home games played across this fine nation, is a good game of poker would be misguided. The maximum bet is $2. We love goofball wild-card games with names like the Fiery Cross and Anaconda that are an insult to actual poker. But we have this in our favor: Cluen chips. They have a reassuring heft and make a solid clink on the table -- you feel the money and the risk they represent. They make us feel like gamblers. They make us feel like men who court fate and deserve luck. The man who made the cluen chips is Jim Blanchard. He lives in Portland, Maine, and owns Poker Chips Online, which was once the Burt company, which was one the Portland Billiard Ball Company -- altogether a Portland commercial-molding dynasty spanning eighty-plus years. Throughout the late '40s and into the middle '70s, the Burt Company made the chips that were bet and lost in all the big Las Vegas hotels: the Sands, the Dunes, the MGM Grand. Arguably the first modern casino resort, Ben "Bugsy" Siegel's Flamingo, opened with metallic-centered chips that were madeon some of the same machinery Jim Blanchard uses today. "That was a time," Jim explains, "when the casino owners were intimately involved in every decision. They personally oversaw the look, feel and quality of the chips." But by the '80s, casinos were making chips of their own and the Burts were selling the business.