Excellent thoughtful response Jim; However I disagree with your premise that ten $10,000 chips are rare.

You stated, "If a casino produces 10 chips with a face value of $10,000 each, are they rare? By any reasonable standard, yes. Is anyone going to collect them? Probably not. That there are NO potential buyers does not make these chips any less rare. It just means no one is going to buy them even though they ARE rare."

Jim, that's exactly my point. When it comes to a commodity, if there is absoltely no demand, that in itself means the item is NOT "rare" in my view. If anybody who wants one can simply plunk down the money on the table to buy it and there are plenty left over for anyone else who wants one .... (but there is NO demand) it just means that the person who bought the first one has lots of money. There are still nine pieces left that nobody wants... but can have, if they posess the resources to pay for it. Using your hypothetical "ten $10,000 chips" example ... may I respectfully ask, what's the difference if there were ten of them, or twenty, or a hundred? If there is no demand for ANY of them ... then NONE of them are rare!

Let's lower the bar from $10,000 chips. My logic being is that there are not 100 collectors of current $500 or $1000 chips ... so in essence if there is an ample supply of an item that will satisfy the demand from collectors who are interested in obtaining a specimen... that fact in itself takes it out of the rarity class. If everybody who wants one can get one, regardless of the denomination .... is it therefore "rare"? I don't think so.

You mentioned "condition". Jim, if there was only one specimen of an arrowdie chip known... but it had a hole in it and the edges were as rounded as a bicycle tire .... does anyone not think there would be tremendous demand for it because of it's rarity ... in spite of its condition?

As for the comparison of a $2.50 chip to a $5 chip, I think they are almost equal in demand.... with the edge going to the $5 chip. However, generally speaking, the fact that there are usually less of the $2.50's make it a scarcer chip ... not necessarily "rarer". If one were to compare a $1 chip to a $5 chip..... arguably, I think the $1 chip would be more in demand.

I think most of us would agree that a chip being offered as "rare" on ebay with a minimum bid of $9.99 in all probability is not "rare" unless the seller has no idea of what he/she is offering.... and that's my bottom line. The overkill of the term "rare" is being dramatically overused too frequently in many chip descriptions. If we can't be honest with ourselves, how can we expect to be honest in our dealings with others?