The Complete Guide › Module 2: Bank, Buy-Ins & Color-Ups

How to Do Color-Ups & Cheque Change

True Poker Dealer · Module 2, Lesson 3

In a casino, chips are also called “checks,” so a color-up and “cheque change” are really the same move in opposite directions: a color-up trades a pile of smaller chips up into fewer, larger ones, and check change breaks a larger chip down into smaller ones. The workspace is identical to a buy-in — incoming on the left, outgoing on the right — and once you've internalized that split, this lesson is mostly about handling volume and proving your count cleanly, even when a player hands you a genuine mess.

The core exchange

Whatever the player hands you lands on your incoming side; the new denomination you're building goes on your outgoing side. For a simple exchange — $275 in red for green and black, say — build a clean, readable stack: full groups closest to you, the short leftover amount up top, mirroring the layout of what came in whenever that makes it easier to read at a glance.

Hand the new chips to the player before you bank the ones they gave you. This is a small sequencing detail that matters: if there's ever a dispute about the exchange, the money is still sitting there, displayed, for everyone to see, rather than already buried in your tray. It also just feels faster to the player — they get what they wanted first.

Reading your bank and the game

Normally you don't skip a denomination tier — green gets colored up to black, red gets changed down to white, in order. But you have to know your bank and your game before following that on autopilot: in a $2/$4 limit game it doesn't make sense to hand out red chips just because that's the "next" denomination up from white. Use your judgment about what's actually useful at that specific table.

You're allowed to say no. If a player pushes you $500 or $1,000 in red and your bank genuinely doesn't have room to absorb it, you don't have to force it — tell them you can't take that much right now and find another solution, whether that's a partial exchange, a chip runner, or waiting for your bank to free up. Not every room allows color-ups at all; always check your house rules on this with your supervisor before you assume the procedure applies.

Handling a large or messy color-up

Every so often a player will shove you a genuinely large, disorganized pile of chips to color up. Don't panic and don't try to count it all in your head at once. Break it into provable chunks as you go — a hundred here, fifty there — proving each piece against itself before combining totals. It's completely fine to take a moment to get this right; rushing a large count is how real errors happen. If your bank doesn't have room for everything you're taking in, it's an accepted stopgap to stack extra full stacks temporarily (on top of existing stacks, for instance) until you have a free moment to get the tray properly organized — just don't leave it that way any longer than you have to.

Standard conventions still apply

Red chips get cut and exchanged in groups of five, the same convention used everywhere else in the tray — resist the temptation to break them into fours just because it's faster in the moment. Surveillance, and every other dealer who touches this bank after you, depends on that consistency. And the same rule from working the bank applies here too: never go hand-to-hand with chips while you're banking them. Set them down, clear your hands, and pick them back up if you need to move them again.