I mean that if past the first few hands a player is still sweating over questions like “wait, what are the purple chips worth again?” — rather than pondering strategic, tactical, probability, psychological or other issues — that is going to be a problem for succeeding at poker.
Say I’m playing in a tournament, and we’re a few levels in. I know the blinds are 200/400. The small blind has two black chips in, and the big blind has one purple. There’s also 9 green chips in front of the dealer.
Preflop, a player in the cutoff position says, “raise,” and slides in three purples and a black.
I’m the button. Do I look down, panic, and think, oh my god, help, time out—let me now read all the printed denominations on the green, black and purple chips to figure out what the heck’s going on?
No. The poker player’s brain knows that the greens are 25s, the blacks are 100s and the purples are 500s. It sees the 9 greens and recognizes them as the antes; the two black 100s are the small blind, the big blind put in 500 (and gets back 100 change if he folds to the raise), and the raiser made it 4x, or 1600. There’s 2200 total in the pot plus the 225 in antes before I act.
How does the brain know this at a glance? Because it noted the chip values at the start of the tourney. Not because the eye is reading denoms every hand. And with even a little experience, that becomes automatic. What’s printed on the chips does not come into it.