Brian invited my 2 chips worth to this thread when he posted; "To all, not just Mike;
Okay... I've argued both sides just to get the discussion moving. (I love a good debate.) Thoughts anyone else???"

Brian then followed up with; " ... if you lightly sand a cigarette burn off an old USPC monogram poker chip, to me that's just cleaning. What you are left with is all original chip. (No cereal fillers or artificial preservatives.) Whether it has lost a little surfacing to cleaning or just wear on the poker table, it seems no different to me."

I strongly disagree with that postiton taken. When you sand the surface of a chip to remove "anything" ... you are removing a portion of the surface of the chip ... thereby "altering" it. They used to call this process "whizzing" in the coin hobby when coins used to be blasted with fine sand ... or tumbled in a vessel to buff up the surfaces. Whizzing was frowned upon back then (in fact numismatic papers would not accept advertising of whizzed coins) and it should be discouraged today in our hobby.