How did I start collecting? Well, I am 32 years old and have always been a collector at heart, started when I was little with matchbox cars and then it moved to baseball cards. Baseball Cards really took a lot of the collector out of me after they all became absolutely worthless (I now have boxes and boxes of worthless cardboard). After baseball cards I really didn't collect much until I started visiting Las Vegas.

My first trip to Vegas was in 2000, I was hooked from the first site of the bright lights from the plane as we landed. Five years later I would marry my wonderful wife at Caesars Palace. On my numerous trips to Vegas I would always come home with some memories: coin buckets, cards, players cards, room keys, do not disturb signs, if it had the casinos name on it I would bring it home, surprisingly I never really brought any chips home. I really didn't play many table games when I went the first few times, I was more of a video poker player.

I still loved collecting everything about Vegas and I have always been on the lookout when going to flea markets/yard sales/auctions for anything Vegas or Gambling related. One morning I was out yardsaling (a typical Sat Morning in the summer for me) and I came across this casino chip in the box marked $.25:

The collector in me immediately scooped it up and became curious about its age, history, value, etc. When I got home I did some searching on the internet. My internet search brought me to ChipTalk, after reading a few thread there I saw people asking info on individual chips being referred to the experts over on thechipboard.com so I checked it out. At first I was like "what kind of board is this", it was hard to understand the threads at first but I found so much great information about chip collecting and I was hooked. Not too long after, I was purchasing chips and searching ebay for deals on chips and I decided to pull the trigger and join the ccgtcc (June 14 2010). This all took place around the time the PA casinos started having table games, one day someone made a post asking who was going to be getting PA chips. I thought, I could do that and help some others out and maybe make some trades to get more chips of my own. The rest is history and now my desk always looks like this:

(this is actually really clean, I just put a bunch of chips in binders over the weekend)