I have been adding some higher denomination gaming tokens to my collection over the past year or two as I run across them. I've concluded there is only one dealer who has any quantity of these for sale, and those are from years ago when he had other interests. If you want to collect gaming tokens, it appears you have to get them from the casino (which isn't a bad idea, anyway).

I would bet that only a few of our club members even know there are such things as tokens above the $1 denomination. I'm talking real gaming tokens now, not the $10 "Premium Tokens" made to be collected that have become popular lately. The high-limit area of most casinos has machines that take tokens of $5, $25, and $100 denominations. Some also have $10 tokens. A few of the strip casinos even have $500 tokens and machines (Caesars, Mirage, and others).

I thought it might be interesting to show a few of these on the "Chip" Board. Might even get a few other collectors interested in preserving these pieces of gaming history!

The first examples are the tokens of The Mirage in Las Vegas. They just changed their token design and I was able to get the old and new ones for comparison. You see the old ones on the bottom row, the new ones on the top row. The old $5 tokens I was able to look at were too beat up to be collectible. If you should happen to have a $5 Mirage "old design", I'd like to trade for or buy it.

Some of the high denomination tokens are pure silver. The old-design Mirage below is .999 silver and has an obviously different luster to it. The $100's have a gold plated center portion to give them some added flash.

If there's interest, I'll post some of the other token sets from Las Vegas. The Harrahs Las Vegas has a particularly interesting picture of a riverboat... the same one as on the short-lived $100 chip!