This year was my first convention, as well as the beginning of my club membership. My primary individual chip collection focuses on snappers and chips w/the 2v pattern. I'm fairly new into both worlds - maybe collecting for a year or so - but it's been fun. My general focus is actually playable casino sets, and there's a whole different group of folks who seem to focus on that.

I had a *fantastic* time at the convention! On Thursday I literally shopped until I dropped, having dug through just about ever $1 and $2 bin for various treasures and came away with a hoard. Before I knew it, 10am became 5pm and I hadn't had anything to eat or drink. I finally dropped my stuff in a booth in Steak N Shake and tiredly consumed a burger while realizing just exactly how sore & tired I'd become from digging through those bins all day! Being a snapper collector I of course stopped by Peter Nathan's booth & we talked shop for a little bit. I got a number of leads on a few other items I've been searching for as well. Good times!

It was also neat to hear Dick Bartley speak. I had heard/seen him around the convention floor and thought I recognized that voice, and then when I read his bio in the program that's when I realized I *did* recognize the voice. Dad and I have listened to his radio shows countless times!

There were three big takeaways from the convention...

1) Everyone was extremely friendly, from club officers to long-time exhibitors to first-time exhibitors to seasoned collectors...folks were great to talk with. There was only one person there that I felt like might have been feeding me a line of nonsense about some of the chips he had for sale, but it just as well could have been something he fully believed to be true and simply couldn't be verified.

2) One of the most common questions I heard all weekend was, "Do you wanna see something you won't find anywhere else in the country/world?" People were VERY proud of what they believed to be their one-of's and otherwise unique chips, and I can't necessarily blame them. We're all there for the chips, so if you've got something you believe to be unique, why wouldn't you want to show it off?! But yes...heard that more often than I thought.

3) The chip-collecting and playable-set collecting segments of the hobby are drastically, dramatically different. I saw chips in $1 bins that would sell to set collectors - even in bulk - at $3-$5ea, but the converse was also true - chips that set collectors might pay $2.50ea for were frequently being sold for $6+. Furthermore, when I mentioned to some of the vendors that I was looking for various chips for folks who were looking to put together full racks, I received many responses to the effect of, "Why? Is that some kind of personal challenge for them or something?" The notion of a playable set just didn't seem to be in the paradigm of most of the vendors at the show. I can certainly understand why that is, but I definitely had to work through some culture shock.

In future conventions, for the benefit of myself and other newer collectors - and even for veteran collectors as a refresher - it would be interesting to have a chip grading calibration station/exhibit available where, say, 15 chips of various grades were on display and we had to mark on a sheet what grade we thought each chip should be listed as. These chips would have been already graded by the folks that put together the Chip Rack guide, but the grades that the editors came up with wouldn't be known to the rest of the vendors/patrons. Then on the last day of the convention the editors' grades would be revealed, as well as the aggregated totals of what all the participants came up with. An exercise like that would help all the vendors & collectors stay on the same page regarding grading, and could lead to some interesting discussion about what we're all looking for when evaluating chips.

I think that's all for now. Thanks for the great convention!