In response to marm:

I did say I still wanted to eat dinner off my table, I'm not prepared to eat spaghetti over some nice felt thats been stapled to the table.

Really, I was just wondering if I would need to somehow build in a foam underlay to my table cloth (perhaps by folding the felt over the foam and sewing it together or something) or whether I could just cut the felt to fit and lay it over the table. Without a foam underlay would the felt still work?

I think that maybe the felt wouldn't be heavy enough and when moving chips across the cloth I would make creases and stuff. So I could use velvet which is heavier (but maybe not so good to play on) or perhaps somehow increase the weight of the end of the cloth by folding it over somesort of extra weights all the way round and sewing it in place.

Just some ideas, please tell me if you think any of this would work or you have better suggestions