Hi Abe. Happy Thanksgiving

Thank you for your expert opinion and a little advertising. There are several things going on in my opinion. Yes, there are burnt $5 cord mold El Rancho Vegas out there. I can not understand why someone would scorch a great classic chip from Las Vegas when the unscorched one would sell for many times more. I feel I am a fairly crafty guy and I think it would be very hard for me to misshapen and scorch any chip to look like that and get far less than the value of a good one. I have had tried to glue real inlays on the original chip when they have fallen off, I have never been successful. I have never sold any of my attempts. It was impossible for me to get the inlay flat at the edge and lineup the crosshatching. Almost impossible to do without obvious detection. On this $5/$25 error chip, the inlay and the chip are level. There are very faint signs of the cross-hatching or lines that go from the chip to the inlay. Both inlays have heat dents and I think that would make it extremely difficult to apply smoothly. There are real 2 different sided error chips out there. I got 27 of the Harveys $2/$2.50 error chips out of Harvey's cage, everything was smooth and lined up. That is proof to me that casinos can keep their misprints and obsoletes lock up in their safe.)

I have seen first-hand chips from the safe of Howdy Herz's house that was burnt to the ground. The chips are the portrait chips from Harold's club. They were in his safe, misshapen, and scorched. Some were stuck together in clumps with some easily separated. (some people believe the scorched chips are from a Harold's Club fire, but they are from Howdy's house fire.)

I did not pull the $5/$25 El Rancho out of the fire but I do believe they were not on the casino floor but in their safe or some kind of storage. I do believe them to be legitimate and almost impossible to counterfeit.

Having fun, Steve