Ed, I understand exactly what you're talking about. We faced some of the same issues with The Chip Rack, although admittedly the market for Nevada chips is far broader than it is for illegals. In fact, anyone who attempts to produce a price guide for chips is going to run into the same kinds of issues.

Your work in cataloging illegal club chips has been invaluable to the hobby, and now with some major manufacturers' records available, can contain even more and accurate information.

As I tried to explain when I wrote the Introduction to TCR, there are so many factors to consider. Part of the problem is that we in the hobby deal with non-governmental issues. When a governmental agency issues coins or paper money, there are public records which can establish mintage numbers, destruction numbers, etc. For us, that information is rarely available. We deal in private issues, and the issuing entities (casinos, both licensed and not) believe that absolute secrecy is in their best interests.

Another consideration, of course, is the size of our hobby. Unlike coin collectors, we do not have thousands of collectors, each of whom is trying to obtain the same rare coin, driving prices through the roof on a relatively consistent basis. Membership in our hobby has declined over the years, not expanded, and that does not bode well for demand.

Still another issue is that private sales of chips and tokens are difficult to learn about. Only the seller and buyer know what was paid for a particular item, unless they tell someone, and that information is not always reliable. That leads to undue (in my opinion) on auction prices realized, especially on eBay, which is relatively accessible. The problem with auction sales is that they reflect only what a particular buyer was willing to pay on a particular day, and he may well have been the sole bidder. A great deal depends on how many collectors saw the listing, how many remembered to follow it, and how many happened to be around at the time the auction was closing. On a different day, it's quite possible that more collectors might be following the item, and more might be there at the end, resulting in higher prices.

Yet another problem in determining "value" is the aberrational nature of such a relatively small audience. To a collector who, for example (a hypothetical, exaggerated example at that), collects only illegal club chips from (pick your location), a given chip may be worth substantially more than it would be to a general collector of illegals. To a collector who needs only one chip to complete his collection of known chips of a certain type, that chip will be worth considerably more than it would be to other collectors. These situations lead to exaggeratedly high prices in auctions, prices which may never be seen again.

Most collectors would like someone to tell them about all chips known, and what each is "worth," but as you've pointed out, that's often not possible.

That is not to say, however, that a catalog of all known chips, with as much information as possible about each one, is not of tremendous value to the hobby.

Don't give up!

Michael