This is the list of the top 20 contributors to the ChipGuide. These are collectors who spent the time and energy to go through their collections, find items that are not on the ChipGuide, scan them and submit them to be listed. They did it because they believe in supporting the hobby and understand how vital education is to collectors. I applaud everyone on the list and the 1,000 other contributors who have also submitted items.

For what its worth, I'd say that we have no better than 50% of all the casino chips ever issued on the ChipGuide. We are much better in some areas than others. if we are talking about table chips under $100 from legal U.S. casinos, the number goes up to maybe 80%. But when you include roulette, limited edition and high denomination chips, the numbers drop. Throw in chips from illegal and foreign casinos and the numbers drop even more.

Why are we missing so many chips? There are lots of reasons why:

1) Nobody has any of them, they were destroyed or locked away and no one has any.
2) No one has bothered to submit them to the ChipGuide.
3) Some are holding back, thinking that their chips may be more valuable if they are not on the ChipGuide. But that is simply not true. Most of the valuable chips are already on the ChipGuide. If you have a valuable chip that is not on the ChipGuide, how can listing on the ChipGuide possibly lessen its value. If anything value is dependent on demand and the more collectors that know about a valuable chip, because they can see it on the ChipGuide, the higher the demand and the higher the value. If a chip of little value is not on the ChipGuide, the only ones who will be fooled and pay more for it because it is unlisted are newby's. True collectors will know the value, whether or not a chip is listed.

A case in point is Cuban chips. I collect chips from the Caribbean and Cuba is in the Caribbean. But I didn't collect Cuban chips because I heard that there are fakes out there and there wasn't a catalog of Cuban chips that I could use to authenticate them. But then collectors submitted Cuban chips to the ChipGuide to the point where I think we have a pretty good catalog of them. Now I can comfortably collect Cuban chips, using the ChipGuide as a reference. The more collectors there are, the more demand there is. Having a catalog to use as a reference, increases the demand for chips and their value.

I wasn't a chip collector back when The Chip Rack first came out, but now I wonder if there were any collectors who objected to it because they didn't want their "rare" chips to be listed.