one time. I asked someone at the casino - maybe the Poker Room Manager - why some chips seemed to have slightly different colors and why the edges on some "clean" chips were cracked and chipped. And he said that they had recently cleaned their chips - the washed chips in fact had an oily feel to them as if they had been "polished" with some cleaner.

I mentioned this at the Southern California collectors meeting at Hollywood Park (yes, it was years back) and someone - perhaps Jim Noll explained the process to me. A cleaning company wheels a big machine into the casino (or its back room I guess). They use a cleaning solution and ultrasound, something like what can be used on dentures, to achieve the desired results. I'm not sure how many chips can be washed at one time, but it's a big pile of them. But either the chemical bath, shaking, or some other part of the treatment subjects the chips to some stress, and little pieces can and do break off.

The process is expensive and smaller casinos may not care to do all that - not wanting to "pick a fight," Steve, but the procedure definitely exists and has been used in California. In Las Vegas - I do not know.