in the chips

Example: “Ever since the patent sold, they've been in the chips.”

Origin: Gambling houses substitute chips for money for practical reasons — they stack, count, and slide across a table far better than banknotes, and they are difficult to counterfeit within a single establishment. They also do something less practical, which is to abstract the money away: betting a stack of colored discs does not feel the same as pushing forward the cash they represent, and card rooms have never been unaware of that. Being in the chips therefore means visibly holding a large pile at the table, prosperity in its most countable and most public form. The phrase is American and early twentieth-century, and it belongs to a whole family drawn from the same table — when the chips are down, cash in one's chips, the blue-chip stock named for the highest-value color.