Now that many people have received their new 11th Edition of The Chip Rack I feel it’s an appropriate time to make some comments. I appreciate the recognition from Mr. P and others so far on The Chip Board, and some of this will be in response to that.

The most obvious thing about the book is the cover, which remains the same. David, Len, and I considered changing the cover but we all agreed that continuity was extremely important with regard to the acceptance of a new edition five years later with new authors. So we left it exactly as it was. Therefore, as far as the 11th Edition is concerned… you CAN tell a book by its cover. I’ll feel comfortable changing it for the 12th Edition.
The next most obvious thing about the book is that we used a thinner, whiter, higher quality paper than in past editions. We feel it makes the print more readable and gives you a better tactile sensation while going through it. It enabled it to keep the thickness of the book to a manageable size.

We also decided to leave the front section, from the acknowledgements through the value code table, the same, with just minor changes. Personally, I have always thought that the intro section was just perfect and if it ain’t broke there’s no reason to fix it. There is no way we could have written it any better than Allan, Michael, and Ernie did.

A note about the acknowledgements section: in my haste all I did was to eliminate the authors’ names from the existing list and recombine it into columns. I have left out at least one of the people who helped me a great deal with the roulettes section, Barry Hauptman. Barry… I’ll make sure I list you in the next edition. I’ll be combing through my e-mails to find anyone else who might have helped me along the way who was not previously listed.

We did, however, make MANY changes to the book. You may like some and not others, but we decided to work backwards from our concepts and the changes just happened. Here’s what we agreed on before we actually started to work on the book:

1) First and foremost, we wanted TCR11 to be a single volume. We therefore knew that we were going to have to omit many tables, etc. that appeared in the 2nd book of the 10th edition.

2) We decided to make the first section more casino-centric and put most of the non-casino chips in a separate section. Drawing a line, though, is extremely difficult and if you go through the book you may find it arbitrary. Why, for example, did we leave the La Rue in the main section and move the Palm Restaurant to the back section? The bottom-line answer is one word: collectability.

3) We decided to change some the sacred TCR numbers. We did this for roulettes and for variations of similar chips. More about this later.

4) We decided that we would eliminate the material that we didn’t feel belonged in the book… manufacturers samples, fantasy chips (new ones appear every week), gift shop chips, etc.

5) We decided to change the inlay descriptions to mixed case for two reasons: Uppercase is difficult to read and many of the inlay descriptions were abbreviated or too long.

We started working on the actual chip information last September. We decided to divide up the labor like this: I was going to do the values, and take care of every other aspect of the existing chip listings. David would add in the roughly 5,000 chips that were issued since the last edition, as well as do the values for the Palms, Hard Rock, and Borland/Osborne chips. Len would take care of the business aspects and take care of the marketing and distribution of the book.

The first thing David and I had to do was to decide what format we would use for the data. The previous authors (Ernie, that is) used an older piece of software (Paradox) which involved multiple tables and scripts to produce a document. We decided that we would use Microsoft Access, with which we are both very familiar, to build the book. We received from Allan, Michael, and Ernie, among other data, 74 Paradox tables and 62 Paradox scripts. We now have 2 tables (one of which is casino data from The Gaming Table) and 1 query.

I decided first to attack the inlay descriptions. This was an entirely manual process, re-typing the descriptions for 20,000+ chips while “unabbreviating” just about everything. I also removed all of the quotation marks... everything in uppercase appears as written on the chip. At this point I had to pick a font that was slightly smaller than that in previous editions of TCR but very readable. I chose one that I use a lot at work called Calibri. It’s clean and tight and reads well in small size. I think you’ll like it.

After this, I began to collapse roulette chips into tables. This turned out to be a MONSTROUS undertaking and is still an ongoing process. David and I came up with color abbreviations and for the table records the colors appear in the inlay descriptions. The actual database has a listing for each individual chip but these do not appear in the 11th edition for those that have been collapsed into table records. We anticipate that you roulette collectors will, in the future, have access to these numbers. An example of what resides in the TCR database is… for the South Point table #1’s roulettes have the number E5027. The color field reads “6 COLORS” and the inlay description reads “ROULETTE 1 [fu-gn-hpi-lv-lbl-nv]”. This means that table 1 has chips in fuchsia, green, hot pink, lavender, light blue, and navy. The database has a line for each chip… the fuchsia chip’s TCR number is E5027.fu, the green chip’s TCR number is E5027.gn, and so on.

Along the way, I tried to pick out chips that were similar and relate them to each other via their TCR numbers. A couple of examples are: Big Al’s Speakeasy $1 with long-cane version of the hat & cane chip: previously N2822 is now N2822.L - Big Al’s Speakeasy $1 with short-cane version of the hat & cane mold: previously E3122 is now N2822.S. The Desert Inn $5 with spun-coin inlay: previously N4518 is now N4518.P – The Desert Inn $5 with smooth-coin inlay: previously N8136 is now N4518.S

The next thing to do was to look at the value of each and every chip in the book. Another arduous pass through the 20,000+ chips. I used many sources for this, including price guides, auction results, other sales of which I was aware, other publications, websites, and lots of e-mails to and from some of the experts. While I was doing this I spend a lot of time verifying the existence of many chips as well.

Over the 9 months in which we worked on the book, I estimate that I spent in the area of 500 to 600 hours working on the data and duplicating the Paradox document from previous editions in MS Access (pretty good job, if I do say so myself!) David estimates that he spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 400 hours dealing with the new chips… going through 5 years of Nevada Gaming Control records, collecting scans, etc.
We worked backwards from our publisher’s deadlines to plan to submit the book by a certain date. The roulette conversion will probably take another year to complete. I converted all of the chips where I was somewhat confident of the table colors, but I still have lots more digging to do. As for the variations, there will be some more changes in the future as I go through and find similar chips I hadn’t noticed before.

We had planned to have the book available by mid-May and the submission was done right on the nose. When I got the blueline back from the publishers I saw that the lines between the records, generated in Access and converted to a .pdf file, were either broken or non-existent in many places. It turns out that MS Access doesn’t necessarily do lines in even pixel thicknesses, and when you convert them to .pdf files, to paraphrase the great Flip Wilson, what you see on screen is not necessarily what you get when you print it. David and I went back and forth with many iterations of the document, several of which went to the publisher and came back to me as bluelines, and finally decided to come up with another solution: alternate line shading. I am thrilled with the results and so far every e-mail I’ve received tells me we made a great decision to do this.

So I think the takeaway is that it would be useful to think of TCR11 as a transitional edition. We will be making further changes to the data and, yes, we didn’t notice the Caesars problem when going through the bluelines. (The reason for this, by the way, is that we are using a different key field than in the Paradox database and the listing for Caesars and the one for the Palm Restaurant had the exact same information in our fields in the Gaming Table casino file… oops!)

After just a few days I’ve already been bombarded with questions… mostly about variations (why did you eliminate this chip? Here’s one you missed… this has a thicker hotstamp. Didn’t you know there was a long-cane and a short-cane version?) I can answer all of these, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. What is a variation for one is not a variation for someone else. And PLEASE… just about every hat and cane chip made in the past several years is made in at least 2 if not 3 versions. I don’t know if it makes sense to list each variation.
We may settle on publishing The Chip Rack every 2 years in May, though we haven’t really concluded the conversations. We WILL DEFINITELY be publishing the 12th edition next year, which will hopefully be a mistake-free one with the roulettes completed.