I've read many of the PRO SLABBING posts and I have ONLY found two recurring thoughts that I keep seeing repeated which are that "GRADING BY A THIRD
PARTY" is beneficial for HIGH END CHIPS and slabbing protects the chips. NOTHING ELSE! Yet as I as a collector don't understand where the benefit comes from.

And as all the old timer's here keep saying, "what makes that third party an expert in grading a chip?" And, WHO is this person(s)? As far as protecting the chips there is a much easier and CHEAPER way such as the correct size coin holder that fits chips to a tee.

BTW a $7 Silver Strike capsule works perfectly! LIKE THIS ONE HERE...

And you can still take your chip out and play with it feel it and get a sense of what it was like to have actually played it at a casino! You can't do that with a chip or token in a "Sonically sealed coffin".

Pro Slabbers have mentioned that new collectors to the hobby would want graded chips.

Now bear with me a moment.

In my honest opinion, most new collectors to our hobby are not collectors of the older HIGH END chips that are not so readily available any way and most of the BIG HIGH END items are already in collector's collections. And who's to say that those chips in the collector's collections are not already the best available.

Then the next question I have is what is the BIG benefit of having a HIGH END chip slabbed if there are so FEW of them available? Put one next to the other most TRUE collectors could tell most differences between them and barter their prices accordingly. Slabbing that high end chip doesn't get the potential buyer any closer that "MINT"
High end chip if it was never available in that condition in the first place. Also, the grading company might be hard pressed trying to determine one of the 4 "VERY GOOD" grades a chip falls into. Especially if they only have 1 chip that is ever submitted for grading.

The real collectors belong to our Club the CC & GTCC and I do believe that the majority of us are not in this hobby as an "investment to put junior through college".

Therefore, most of us do not see any useful purpose for a slabbed/graded casino chip/token.

Keep bearing with me...

Our club has a membership number of 5000+ that isn't reflective of the true active membership number. Active membership is somewhere around 2500+(Some members have let their membership lapse and when renewing received a new membership number.... even our Past Presidential Candidate Mr. Reilly can attribute himself to two club numbers) which makes our group small. Even if there were another 2500 chip collectors (and I think this is an over stated number) who know nothing about a chip collecting organization, the number of total collectors is still small.

Now throw into the mix approximately 300 Silver Strike collectors who are members of the club and the number of actual chip collectors gets smaller.

Take under consideration that another nearly 300 online chip collectors state that they will not purchase a slabbed/graded chip makes the number of collectors wanting slabbed chips even smaller.

Now lets estimate that of the other 1900 active club members only 1/10 of them are truly HIGH END collectors. Now you've got 190 collectors most of which may already have that HIGH END chip in their collection or there are so few of those HIGH END chips that there aren't enough to go around.

My next question is... How many of these HIGH END "collectors" (as opposed to investors) would actually be interested in having that Slabbed chip in their collection? All of them? A few of them? NONE?

Question is what do you and me mean by HIGH END? Someone suggested chips at $1000 or more. As I am not a collector of any HIGH END chips my HIGH END is definitely lower. My question is just how many of the HIGH END chips are available in the market place to begin with? I would think very few.

I believe that most of our clubs HIGH END collectors might feel that in order to get this HIGH END chip they MUST buy it Slabbed if that is the only way to obtain it? Talk about putting it down a collector's throat! My next question is that by being slabbed what is the price difference between it and the similar non-slabbed condition chip that comes up for sale next week/month/year?

As for the baseball card I have pictured here.

The slabbed card is going for upwards of $500 on e-Bay and the unslabbed cards are lucky to sell for a few bucks.

However, this is a phenomenon in the baseball card collecting world as probably millions of this card was made an maybe thousands of potential GEM MINT 10's exist. The same cannot be said true of casino chips/tokens.

I am back to HIGH END again. How long before the "RECENT" issue of the Riviera Porno Star chips become what you consider HIGH END chips. We can't say that Slabbing won't come to current issues. Another sample is the RECENT extremely low production chips, we know that there are not enough to go around to even our small group. And with these chips being taken straight from the casino cashier cage they should all be MINT GEMS! So grading shouldn't even come into play so why should they be slabbed?

(Hypothetically)...
OOPS I forgot, this new issue just released there were only 50 produced and the cashier dropped the full rack of 50! 20 were broken by the fall and due to employees stepping on them and 15 were mildly to badly chipped and scratched and one of the employees picking them up had toner cartridge ink on their hand and 10 have ink smears on them. NOW we need the third party to grade them to find the perfect 5 that are left out of the 30 that exist.

Looking at E-bay I see a BIG disparity between prices of a SLABBED/GRADED item and a similar looking unslabbed item. I see no relationship to rarity pricing in these auctions only a MAJOR pricing difference relating to graded vs. ungraded.

I am of the opinion that slabbing has no useful or real purpose in the this small community. Please show me where it is useful. I'm still listening! Help me understand! "BUT" show me how this "THIRD PARTY GRADER" is more reliable than my fellow CC & GTCC members and dealers are, when describing a chips condition to me regardless of how many or how few grades there actually are.

I currently believe this is NOT what most "collectors" want to see in our casino chip/token collecting hobby. Notice I said MOST and not ALL.

I also believe if a person feels they want to buy or sell a slabbed chip/token that's their right.

I also feel that the club officer's have a right to do what they feel they must do, with what is and is not allowed at the club activities, whenever that those officers feel it's in the clubs best interest at any given point in time.