Casinos order chips more often than we may think.

First, I have to blame Dick Covington for this note and for making me look! He'll pay for this!

I happened to be going through a few duplicates of Binion's Horseshoe $1's and wondered if there were UV tagging on any of the chips. Sure enough, one of them was tagged; the others were not.

That piqued my curiosity, so I obtained 100 Binion's $1's to go through. (Don't even ask.)

So far, I know of at least 7 different varieties of current Binion's $1 chips. I'd scan them and post them for you, but they all look the same! Well, almost. Two of the varieties are horshu rim chips, and the other 5 are H&C rims, but otherwise they look virtually identical.

I know of no explanation for the varieties of UV tagging other than that each variety is a separate production run from the manufacturer.

All very interesting, but what I learn from this exercise is that casinos reorder replacement chips much more often than we may think, keeping the same design. That's one of the reasons we find slight color variations, or slight inlay printing variations also.

Michael