As Bart Simpson would say, "Haha". No convention wish list this year and I'm feeling pretty smug. (What's new?) I've had two chips in past shows that I've hunted w/o success and I know the frustration you can feel when you look at 100,000 chips and can't find YOURS! Unbelievable that my particular dog has a middlin' R rating and I've seen images of it everywhere but there's none for sale this year, huh? Buncha stinking Bugsy's, arrowdies everywhere, boxes of Milton Prells holding down flyers for car washes, folks zinging Dopey Norman chips across the room and yelling "Woooooooooooooooo" but where is MY puppy? Skunked again.

Well. So far. I've bagged my Most Wanted Chips. So far. Well. There is this one chip...

I'm not much of a completist as far as my collecting goes, I don't have any money to spend on ugly chips and if an outfit issued nine beauties and and one beast, I'll be happy with only the nine. Did manage to gather all these Hotel Nevada Ely chips however. Nothing too scary for me here. In fact, when you look at a group of a particular chips enough times over the years you begin to notice some pretty fine details... that probably don't matter much to anyone else. Five colors of wheel chips seems an odd number but a post card shows folks playing halves and dollars on the layout as well. One chip here will actually be on the floor but not in the condition I've presented. I've got the only good ones I've ever seen in six years of collecting and that is not very many, gratified that KMW quadrupled the value in #10, they must not see many these days either. Hard to believe they bothered to cancel a chip from Ely, usually "extra" chips got burned in the fire and claimed in the insurance settlement. Hmm. Cool about that Hotel Nevada chip that was being sold for cheap in the collector market when it reappeared as a live chip on the table at Hotel Nevada. Spend the night in Ely, pick up a couple of those Chipco snappers that the dealers like so well, very nice trade items after the banquet.

"Holy smokes! That's the chip I need for my collection!" Who said that to me at the convention? The fellow who just sold it to me out of his table partner's binder! "Really." I said, "Have a nice day." Found him a nice example over at Fran Belker's table and we both plugged that hole in our collection. Had him going pretty good for a little while though. Happy hunting everyone!