The Casino Chip Collecting Craze
By Liz Benston
Quite a few years ago, yet another collector's item broke a sale-price record on eBay, the online auction juggernaut.
A nondescript, mustard-and-brown-colored casino chip featuring the long-gone Hacienda casino's logo -- a pink rider on a yellow horse -- sold for a whopping $15,200.
While aficionados may have paid even more for chips in private transactions, the price was the highest ever paid for a gambling token in a public sale.
The chip made a comeback a few years ago at the Casino Chip & Gaming Token Collectors Club, where a few intrepid buyers made offers that would make the head swim. But they weren't high enough to tempt the unnamed seller -- a guy who no doubt knew the Hacienda was one of the last vestiges of Old Vegas and was one of a few casino hotels to be imploded in the 1990s to make way for a new generation of megaresorts. He likely also knew that the Hacienda stood where the Mandalay Bay resort now is like a giant gold ingot at the entrance to the Strip.
To fully comprehend why someone would shell out more than 10 grand for a small piece of clay, however, one must spend some time talking to the collectors who make the annual pilgrimage to the Tropicana each year.
The nonprofit group, which held its 11th annual meeting at the Las Vegas resort a few years back, has grown from about a dozen members to about 2,800 people hailing from at least nine countries.
About 800 people pre-registered for the event.
Like many collectors' groups, chip collectors have spent years mastering the art of valuing tokens. At the event, experts trolled the aisles, squinting at chips covered in protective plastic or in glass display boxes like so many gemstones. With a diamond dealer's eye, they can detect slight differences in shade or pinprick-sized nicks that could slash a chip's price in half. Such was the case with two Landmark Hotel chips on display, virtually identical to the naked eye. One artifact from the Las Vegas hotel, imploded in 1995, was worth $1,400 and another was worth $2,800.
Many token collectors begin to indulge their passion innocently enough. During the occasional trip to Las Vegas, they stash a chip or two as a souvenir. Later, they set out to buy chips during their trip in the hope that they will fill out a collection of different denominations or colors. They may also skip the trips altogether, meeting with friends or other collectors to trade tokens.
Many categorize their hobby -- only collecting riverboat chips, Las Vegas chips or tokens from Atlantic City. Others may limit their finds to $1 chips or $100 tokens. And some may choose an era instead, collecting chips from the Rat Pack days, for example.
Jim Munding, a reserve deputy sheriff from Los Angeles, set out to collect chips about 20 years ago by playing the tables up and down the Strip.
He started with about $100 and bet in $1 and $5 increments, leaving with his chips if he won and doubling up and trying again when he lost.
"I didn't like losing money so I had to find something else to do," said Munding, who has since moved on to collecting slot club cards.
Vince and Bettye Mowery also began their collecting career with chips.
"They catch your eye -- they're so pretty," said Vince Mowery, presiding over an impressive collection that has since grown to include lapel pins, dice, ashtrays and swizzle sticks.
The most eye-catching of them all were several jewelry boxes made from craps dice.
The event has become somewhat of a social event for the Las Vegas couple, who have attended every gathering since inception.
"We see the same people. But most of us don't see each other the rest of the year," Bettye Mowery said.
Boulder City resident Rich Klabacha has his own strategy. Klabacha, an avid collector of vintage beer signs, is on a mission to collect at least one chip from every casino in Nevada. His collection of up to 4,000 chips is still short about 50 tokens.
Many of his chips are packed away in boxes, though others are displayed throughout his home.
"My wife said no to the living room and dining room," said Klabacha, who served as the keeper of rows of choice chips up for sale later that evening. "I have the garage and other areas" available for displays, he said.
The conventioneers on hand may have all been born collectors. But they also admit that buying up gambling tokens is different from dealing in other memorabilia.
Gambling in one form or another is now a mainstream pastime, available in all but a few states. But its outlaw past isn't easily forgotten.
"For me, it's all about the history, the romance, the nostalgia" of gambling, said Mike Skelton, the club's president and a Dallas-area office equipment dealer.
The tokens -- which also include tie tacks, matchbooks, ashtrays, swizzle sticks, dice, photographs and even napkins -- offer a rare peek at the mob-controlled casino world that few have known outside of the countless books and movies that have romanticized the Sin City of old.
Wild West images were more prevalent back then, just a few decades from when Las Vegas was just another railroad boomtown in the desert. The showgirl became a major design element of the bold icons that took over in the 1960s and 1970s, her bikini-clad figure and headdress surfacing on everything from napkins to matchbooks.
Hang around the chip displays for long and the experts will no doubt begin buzzing about "Bugsy chips." Affectionately named after the fearsome mobster who ran the opulent Flamingo Hotel in the 1940s, the Flamingo chips are among the most desired on the collectors' circuit.
As with anything else that is rare and carries value, the Flamingo chips are likely to appreciate the most, Skelton said.
Case in point: A couple who sold a mint-condition set of 18 chips for $85 each in the late 1980s could probably get more than $10,000 per chip for them today, he said.
Fairly modern items also have yielded profits for savvy collectors.
Munding, who presided over several binders filled with slot club cards, is considered a nationwide expert in such items.
Slot clubs have been around at least 25 years but didn't become popular with players until just a few years ago, he said.
In the dinosaur days, slot cards looked like plain-jane credit cards, with notches cut into them to distinguish one customer from another. Now they are crafted with magnetic strips and come in every conceivable color and design.
Seventy-five bucks will buy a Westward Ho casino card circa 1990, holes and all. One of the original clubs, a 1982 card from the Dunes, sells for less.
Casinos in recent years began serving the market by minting collectible cards, chips and other items for sale. The Stardust now offers a card commemorating the casino's 45th anniversary, while the Hard Rock has sold chips based on the hit reality TV show "The Osbournes."
"More people are coming into (chip collecting) as a hobby," Skelton said, which in turn yields more collectible chips.
That also means more dealers with stories that are as colorful as the tokens on display.
Curious chunks of concrete embedded with casino chips nearby leads to a story about how Las Vegas casinos used to dispose of their unwanted chips, for example.
Under Nevada law, casinos must destroy casino chips that are discontinued or otherwise replaced. In the early days, some casinos would dump the chips in Lake Mead, grind them up or dump them at construction sites.
"In the old days they had no value. They had to get rid of them somehow," said Barry Weintraub, a chip dealer and the former head of the Southern California chapter of chip collectors.
When the 1950's era Dunes was blown up in 1994 to make way for what would become the Bellagio resort, contractors found the Las Vegas equivalent of an Egyptian tomb -- chips from across Las Vegas had been thrown into the wet concrete used to form the Dunes' swimming pool.
Then there's the story about a man in Texas who surfaced recently with a few 1940s era chips from the long gone El Rancho -- considered the Strip's first resort when it opened in 1941. The man was a shill at the craps tables and managed to save a few chips after the casino changed over to new chips. Their potential value could be enough to keep many a collector awake at night.
In the mid 1990s, the Flamingo created a "Rockettes" chip based on the famous chorus line dancers from New York. But the chips were pulled from the floor because they didn't have the appropriate trademark rights from the group, so the story goes. Each three-chip set is probably worth about $75, collectors say.
More recently, the Riviera created chips with the images of adult performers. State regulators pulled the chips after complaints about the risque images, dealers say, creating an instant collectors' market.
Such are the kinds of tales that keep people coming back year after year. That and a final auction that draws the boldest of aficionados to the bargaining table.
On the final day of the event, 254 lots of tokens sold for a total of about $80,000 -- about 40 percent more money than was generated at last year's auction. The club makes a commission off each sale.
About 18 of the lots sold for more than $1,000 -- also higher than last year's take.
"We had better items and higher prices," Weintraub said.
And what of the Hacienda chip?
"It will be back out there again, maybe in six months or next year," he said. "The owner of the chip is not willing to give it away."