I remember earlier this week somebody posted a message asking how chip collecting has changed in the past years. Forgive me if any of this has already been covered but I finally have time to post my thoughts. I have been collecting $1.00 chips since the early 80's when I first snuck into the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City before I was of age. I took home with me some chips, coin cups, pens, and napkins. The chips were the only thing that stuck around. When the Brighton went out of business and became the Sands I thought it was cool that I had a Brighton chip and decided to start collecting $1.00 chips from all over. I finally made it out to Vegas a few years later and spent two days in my Aunt's car driving around to every casino I could find. Most of the time I walked out disappointed because they used tokens and not chips at the blackjack tables. I later found out that a lot of casinos that used tokens at the blackjack tables used chips at their craps tables, so off I went again to find chips. I came home with a bunch, my collection totaled somewhere around 40 to 50 chips. Surely I had all the chips that there was to collect. Who could possibly have a larger collection of chips then I? In the following months I learned that California had legal card rooms that all used chips. How can that be, California doesn't allow gambling? Even more unsettling was that the chips that I had from Vegas were only the current chips being used by those casinos. What do you mean, that casinos change their chips and the old ones are destoyed, how am I going to get some of those? Now, I wondered if my 50 or so chips was truly the largest collection out there. Being in my early twenties I couldn't travel around the world just to collect chips, what to do? I composed a letter that I hand wrote and mailed to the "casino cage" of every casino or card room that I could get a mailing address for. I looked in current and back issues of Poker Player (precurser to Card Player) for addresses and phone numbers of places I thought used chips. I went to the library and looked in old phone books for addresses. I mailed out close to 100 requests for chips. I still have an original draft of my letter. It suggested that I collected $1.00 chips and I would like to add a chip from their casino to my collection. I offered to pay for the chip and never asked for one just for them to let me know if it was possible for me to buy one from them. I never once got a letter back from one of the places telling me it was ok to buy a chip from them. I did however get back a lot of return letters that had a chip enclosed, no charge, and a thank you for taking an interest in their casino and wishing me luck with my collection. I spent months waiting for the mailman to see what surprises he had for me. Now I was sure that I had the biggest collection, in fact I might be the only person in the world how collects casino chips.

Part 2 --- Bill Borland and the CC>CC --next