You're right about the noise on eBay from the home poker chip and casino equipment sellers. I finally decided to spend some time to see if I could eliminate most of this type of auction lot from my search. I added these terms to my "exclude" string:

-(suited, "brand new", 11.5, 11.5g, "carrying case", "table top", "DIAMOND POKER")

And it seems to be doing the job. I've reduced the number of hits in my daily search by several hundred lots. I carefully looked at the kind of lots that were being excluded to be sure there weren't many valid lots that have these terms. I scan both titles and descriptions. I believe these are safe. You might consider adding this to your search if you'd like to spend less time jumping over modern poker chips, tables, etc. that you don't collect. If you are interested in new casino chips, you may want to skip the "brand new" entry.

By the way, I finally decided I was spending much too much time looking at inexpensive lots and about a month ago, changed my search to include lots that had minimum bids or were currently bid at $10 to $10,000. This really cut down the number I look at, and I figure that since I only look at auctions in the 24 hours before they close, I will catch any lots listed cheap, but which are discovered and bid up by knowledgable collectors. I know I miss out on some antique poker chips that I'd like to bid on, but this saves me at least an hour a day. I'll get my poker chips at the chip shows, I guess.

Note that you have to go to the "Refine Search" page to add the filter by auction price. When you get the search string the way you want it, you can save it to your My eBay page and use it in your daily searches.