Antique Casino Collectibles

Video Transcript

"Viva Las Vegas, a huge collectible are casino chips. As a matter of fact gambling or they call them gaming collectibles is a huge huge hobby and they have a gaming collectible convention every year. It is a huge organization and actually they have it in Las Vegas and speaking of that if you ever go to the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas they have a fantastic gaming museum on the first floor where they have the original dice, the original ash trays, the original photos all kinds of cool stuff and they have a lot of the original of what I'm going to talk about right now, gaming chips and this is a book can you imagine? Somebody wrote a book about gaming chips. Las Vegas chips for instance. Here they are a whole section on them and I've got a great story about this. When I was in Las Vegas last year I started talking to this guy at the craps table, I don't know I'm not a very good gamer, it might have been 21 and I was talking to this guy who said do you collect chips because he said he was about ready to retire. He says as a matter of fact I've been collecting chips here since I was young and I've been working here for about 30 years and he says I just have a phenomenal collection and so I started talking to him about this and he knew about the collectors and he said I've got a little hinter for you, here's a great pointer. Chips that are commemoratives are really great and it just so happened that Tony Bennett was playing at this casino I forget which one it was a the time. They made a certain number of Tony Bennett chips just to commemorate or to celebrate the fact that he was playing in their casino and it was so so cool. So he says do you want a couple of them? Well they were $25 a piece oh well but anyway, so I got a couple of those Tony Bennett chips and I'm saving them because they make a very limited number of those and they are going to be hugely collectible because how many people are going to have a Tony Bennett chip? Another cool story about chips one time I was in a thrift shop and I found a bag of chips and they looked really old. This was before I knew about chips and they turned out to be clay poker chips from the old saloons in Nevada. I bought the bag for $1.97 and I sold each chip for over $100. There was about 20 chips in there. So you look at what they are made out of. This is a wonderful book because you know some of the hotels that are out of business, the Thunderbird, the Silver Slipper, those are the ones that are seriously collectible so if you want to do a research it is a great hobby because it doesn't take up a lot of space and it is really fun to look for them. This is the best one, this is what all the collectors tell me, "The official US Casino Chip Price Guide." It is a great take with you kind of book too, very fun reading, buy it."