Mirage $1 “Poker” chips

Undoubtedly more than you’ll want to know, but here goes anyway … 

In 2013, Mirage issued these $1 “Poker” chips to be used in its popular Poker Room. Maybe 30-40 tables? So quite a few racks of $1’s were designed and ordered. A different color than the dark blue $1’s used in the main casino.

Here’s the NGCB “Chip & Token Report” record of the order, from their “Historical Report” on the NGCB website:

Also, a pic of the chip, from ChipGuide, for reference:

At that time, I routinely purchased some new issue chips from Ricky P. at all-chips.com. Mostly Atlantic City chips, but Ricky also got new/uncirculated chips from Las Vegas. I ordered one of the Mirage “Poker” chips, and when it arrived, I noticed it only said “Poker” on 1 side. Ricky may have noticed the error, independent of me, of my inquiry to him may have been the first notice of it. Anyway, he checked his stock for other errors and the word was out about the regular vs. error chip … and eventually the double-error chip too. (Regular = “Poker” on both sides; Single error = “Poker” on one side only; Double error = “Poker” missing on both sides.)

ChipGuide and TCR both acknowledge the 3 versions in their listings, with the double-error being the rarest. I’ve been able to acquire all 3 versions, but paid a premium for the double-error.

Now for some speculation & mathematics. (If anyone has better math, I’m interested – this is just my personal speculation.) –

Let’s say these inlays (7/8 inch in diameter, I think) are produced from a master page (8-1/2 x 11 inch) in a 5 x 10 arrangement, or 50 inlays per page. Since you need 2 inlays per chip, each page, when reproduced in quantity, will make 25 x 2-sided chips. Equivalent to saying it takes 4 pages of inlays to make a box of chips (100 chips per box).

Let’s further speculate that the master page, which is supposed to have “Poker” written on EVERY inlay, has only 49 inlays with “Poker”, while the 50th inlay does NOT say Poker – in error.
That means, when producing “side 1”, 49 out of 50 (98%) are correct and 1 out of 50 (2%) are errors. Now it’s time for “side 2”: 98% x 98% = 96.04% correct chips with “Poker” on both sides. The remaining 4% are either single-error or double-error chips. The double-errors occur at the rate of 2% x 2% = 0.04%, assuming random distribution of error assembly between side 1 and side 2. The remaining production of chips will have 1 error (either side 1 or side 2, but not both).

Given a quantity of 10 boxes of chips (= 1000 chips), 960 chips will be correct, 39.6 will have a single error, and 0.4 (or about ½ chip per 10 boxes) will be a double error.

If Mirage ordered 200 boxes of chips (my estimate only; may be high or low??), that’s about 392 single-error chips and only 8 double-error chips.

Important caveat: My personal estimate is that the errors happened more frequently than the above, as I think there are quite a few more than 8 double-errors out there. This could occur if there are less than 50 chips printed on the master page (for example, a 5 x 5 page would have only 25 chips per page); or the error rate may be more than a single error per page. Any adjustment would produce more errors (single and double) than the above illustration.

Suffice it to say the ratio of double-errors vs. regular chips is still extremely low, leading to a substantial price & rarity differential between them.