Value and rarity are two different aspects of chip collecting. With rarity, you're talking about the number of chips that were either made, known to still exist, or are estimated to exist based on past sales. The only way that R raings will tend to go is usually *downwards*, due to either discoveries of a cache of chips (say, a box of 100 more chips) or even a few that show up in a long-forgotten drawer. As another posted commented, your R-8 chip might become a R-4 or even an R-2 chip a year or two down the line.

Now, value is a different thing. The two price guides are good to give you a general estimate of what the value of a chip is, but remember that these guides are three years old. You do have some inflation that will show up in chip prices, and you also have to deal with the fact that if a chip is rare (say an R-6 or higher) that the law of supply and demand will affect the prices. And along with that is the good old fashioned desire of wanting a specific chip for a collection, which might cause the price to go up (or your willingness to pay more than what the chip is valued at simply because it's something you would enjoy having.)

Collecting chips as a way to make money is not a good thing. Chip collecting is much like stamp collecting and/or coin collecting, in that you're going to have a lot of choices that will not really increase in value over time, and a very few that will have an extremely high value to them. (Think of it as you're collecting quarters... the state quarters are common as dirt and won't go up in value, but the silver ones from the 30's and 40's will be worth more simply because there aren't as many any more, then you have that rare quarter that fetches a few thousand.) For me, the fun of collecting is the history of the casinos and the era that it invokes (I have been specializing in chips from the 50's and 60's for the most part).

So enjoy the hobby... just don't expect to get rich doing it. *GRYN*