I have been looking at Bud Jones chips under blacklight over the last couple
months and have ended up with more questions than when I started.

I can’t tell a PLA-1 from a PLA-1a, light bunnies, dark bunnies, to me they look
the same. One of the old auction catalogs, 96 I think, they say that the two types are
distinguishable under blacklight. So I dug out the disco trunk a pulled out a 15W
blacklight. Next I got ahold of 21 $1 Atlantic City Playboy chips from as many sources as
I could, and took a look.

What I found is the appearance under the blacklight varied greatly with the setup.
Effects came and left with the amount of room ambient lighting, how clean the chip was,
position and distance of the blacklight, etc. In all I have about 45 Bud Jones chips from
the Playboy casinos in AC and Nassau and blacklight effects varied all over the board. The
most dramatic I found were with incandescent lights in the room background and the
blacklight on the table about 10” from the chips. The Bahamas $1 chips, white with brown
designs, the brown turned to bright purple! The Bahamas $25 the orange designs turned to
bright pink. On the other hand on the Bahamas $100 the purple remained the same purple
design, nothing dramatic. In a dark room with only blacklight the $1 didn’t glow, $25
designs looked white, and the $100 was about the same.

AC chips were similar. With background lighting the blue designs on the $1 seem
to glow a bright blue, almost translucent! Under only blacklight the white fields glow more
than the blue designs. Again, under mixed lighting the AC $5 yellow and $25 yellow
designs turn to a bright white against a dark background. Another interesting thing that
happened with the AC $1 chips under only blacklight, 10 of them had background (white)
fields that glowed lightly red and 11 that glowed a definite orange. I could mix them all up
and separate them again repeatedly with this characteristic. I thought I had found the
answer to the blue bunny question until I turned on the room lights and saw that the
orange group were all badly stained with nicotine.

I would guess from what I’ve seen that these chips were intended to be inspected
in a lit room near a low intensity blacklight where, in most cases, certain design features
would glow. Interestingly some pieces, like the $25 Silver Jubilee do not glow in any
situation.

Sorry about running on, but, this was only a brief summary. If anybody has
experience with counterfeit detection designs (or Bud Jones designs) I’d like to hear from
them.