Steve:

There were at least four new route tokens issued this year - for Deadwood South Dakota Sturgis motorcycle rally.

A recent trip to there along with Cripple Creek, Black Hawk and Central City that for the smaller casinos, tokens are very much in use including using $5.00 tokens on Black Jack tables.

Prestnly, it is too expensive for the smaller casinos to retrofit there slot machines with the TITO devices so they are sticking with tokens.

Another benifit is not too many collectors will take a token (reducing the casino's replacement cost) as opposed to chips.

While the larger casinos are scaling back on tokens, there are still a large number of casinos that still use tokens.

However, I agree, as a hobby and as a token collector, we should encourage the larger casinos to continue to offer tokens in the same maner that they accomidate chip collectors.

Having said that, you probably will not hear from a whole lot of either chip/strike collectors until the casinos stop using those.

John