Haven't posted on this board in a million years. I am going to type this story pretty quick , so lets keep the typo jokes at the a minimum.

As a quick note I live in San Diego no in Mission Beach and own a Thrift store out here , and we do a lot of Estate Liquidations.
So if anybody needs to get rid of a bunch of stuff , I am buying BTW I am married now , and have a beautiful 10month old daughter which is my whole world.

Anyways I read the discussion about the Thunderbird chips that was posted a few months ago. That chip was always a great argument with no 100% proof. I always been attacked good about that one , but it mainly goes back to because I would never support the anti-slapping groups. I was more neutral and felt my customers should have a choice. Anyways I really don't care about that anymore.

I am not selling chips , except every now and then I list something on ebay if we find something in a Estate. So I have nothing to gain here . But because I did love this hobby and still have a soft spot for it I wanted someone to record the %100 straight facts from the one of the main players in this deal.

OKay first off in every post it says the chips that RENE sold. Well that is partially right . The chips where sold to the public by a company called THE NEVADA MINT . At that time it was owned by Rich Burgel , Steve Cutler and myself. So we all three sold the chips .

BTW I am doing all these #'s from memory so I try to be as accurate as I can recall. Gene said in his post that the story of how we found the chips was a little funny. Well we never claimed to found them or did. They where actually discovered by James Campiglia his Partner at the time Randy ( not sure if they are still together ) David Sarles and Barry Weintraub. They use to run ads together all accross the nation for chips. Haven't talked to those guys in a few years if you read this hope you doing good. Anyways they got the chips in a deal and a couple of days before the convention we heard about them. Somehow it came up that we might be interested in buying all of these in shot from them. We compared the logos with a ashtray and a postcard and also a picture of the logo from the club in IL . James told us he was 90% sure that it was from vegas and so did everyone else involved in the deal. BTW I still believe it is a Vegas Chip. So we bought the chips for $3000 I believe.

Gene Said he knows we had at least 100 . We we actually had around 600 chips , even at one point of the convention we had 3 or 4 racks dumped on a table and let people pick the best example that they wanted for themselves. BTW we told people that we believed they are from Vegas but there is some controversy about the Chip. Out of the 600 Chips probably 200 to 300 where trash because they where either broken or the logo was worn so bad. We priced them at $25 per chip which we thought was very fair , and most collectors aggreed because we sold most of them. Even as a illegal it woulda been worth $25. But like I said I still believe it is a Vegas chip and a Very cool looking chip at it.

No record has ever been found to my knowledge stateing that it is or is not a Vegas chip. We just compared the logos , and the best match was on a post card that james had , which shows the way Thunderbird in front of the casino and the body is square on one part and going up in steps , and which was the exact same logo on the chip.

Anyways there where also I believe 7 $25 chips. Which we never sold the original finders each kept one and them steve rich and myself each got one.
I ended up selling mein to a collector later one.

Like I said here you got the straight facts about the chip. I have nothing to gain or lose , just to share some history
This was one of my favorite chip deals , because I think it was a very cool chip , and I think a lot of our customers at the convention enjoyed getting it. it was a old chip at a cheap price.

I hope that answers some questions about the chip

BTW I have none for sale , I might have one in my collection I kept but I don't even think I have that.
Maybe I need to check on ebay

Best Wishes and happy chipping
Rene

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