This way, you won't be sitting around for years plying with slippery plastic chips wishing you had something better. But these days, there are so many high-quality mid-range chips at an affordable price that you will probably want to jump straight into the mid-range chips. In the past, the popular move has been to start off with a cheap set of plastic chips ('Dice chips') and trade up to expensive clay chips after a few years. Today, there are so many different sub-types and brands of chips that a considerable amount of research has to go into buying a good set of chips. Ceramics grew to compete with clay chips. Higher quality plastic chips were created. Some of the cheaper plastic chips were created without metal slugs. In the following years, there were many niches in the chip market that opened up and grew. I remember a 300-set would go for $60 and a 500-set would go for $100 or so. Before the poker boom, the now-cheap 11.5 gram chips were the standard for home games, and sold for much higher prices. The internet aided this trend since it lowered prices and made it easier for customers to place their orders and create custom chips. But after the poker boom got underway, many poker aficionados wanted a higher-class chip to play with in their games so the poker chip consumer market boomed. Before the poker boom there wasn't much of a market for high-quality chips for consumer use.