Where are our beautiful chips today? Look at these $1 chips. They are ALL works of art (OK, perhaps the Jerry's Nugget leaves a little to be desired, but that's besides the point). Where are the awesome looking $1 chips today? At the Hard Rock?! PLEASE!! At The Rio?! GIMME A BREAK!! At Bally's?! YAWN!!

We talk ALL the time about how our hobby isn't as healthy as we would like it to be. Well, unless you are a hard core collector, who the hell wants to collect most of these current $1 chips?! They are SOOOOOOOOOOOOO BOOOOOOOOOOORING!!!!!!! Look at the 9 chips Dick has posted. Now look at 9 of the most recent $1 chips issued. They aren't works of art. They aren't the kind of chips you want to sneak one in your pocket as a reminder of a great chip that you want to post in your man cave. They are serviceable at best. At worst, they are made this way by the casino so you DON'T take one home. How do you keep a hobby going when you are offering chips that less than 1% of your clientele want to keep?

I went to the AMA convention in December. I talked to a person there who prefers casino chips over coins because they have so much more color and character than coins. So we have a hobby people are interested in. But until casinos stop seeing us as the bad guys and start seeing us as the people who are giving them advertising $1 & $5 at a time by showing off THEIR casino chips, their history, our hobby could become a niche hobby instead of what we are trying to be, a Museum of Gaming History.