Good questions, Jim!

Here's my take. You said: "If I get 20 $1 chips from a casino cage and use 19 to make trades for 19 chips from casinos I have not been to, and, the trades are NOT with dealers, how does that figure into your 'survey'?" The way I look at it, if you're just rrading value for value for chips you've obtained from casinos, you're still at 100%, and it doesn't make any difference whether your trades are with other collectors or with dealers. Regardless of denomination.

You also said, "if your focus is on the importance of dealers (which in my opinion is very high) then some responses will not be reflective of that." I couldn't agree more, Jim - dealers are essential to the hobby! My reason for the survey was not to disparage anyone or any method of collecting. It's just to find out how many of us obtain our chips mostly first-hand, from casinos.

While I didn't respond to my own post, I have included my response in the tabulation. For anyone curious, I figure about 15-20% of my collection is first-hand from casinos. When I started (and I suspect this is true of many of us), it was much higher. In fact, I would only collect chips from casinos I'd actually played in. That changed when I began reading about the history of the casinos I had been in, and I started collecting chips from past incarnations. Those, of course, were available only from dealers.

Now, since I've narrowed my collecting interests substantially, the purchases from dealers have risen even more sharply. I collect ivories, for example, and since no one is actually playing with them any more, dealers are the ONLY source for them. My Montana collection is a bit different - it's still possible to get quite a few chips directly from casinos, although you have to play poker to get them. Still, there are quite a few long-gone casinos whose chips I must have and those have to be purchased from dealers (or traded for).

Although I don't think we have responses from all our online collectors yet, it seems pretty clear that chips obtained from dealers predominate!

Michael