Fred, I think you may have drawn a few incorrect conclusions.
Im not going to go into full detail on everything as you will understand when you read my answer.

"Then he leaves a very good professional high paying career, and becomes a chip dealer."
There is a 6 year gap between.
I was based in London with KPMG until 1996, when I took a job with one my clients (a major Dutch bank). 6 months later a change of governance brought a restructure which relocated by job to Holland. The very same day this was announced my mother was taken to hospital having suffered a stroke. My father had already been ill for some time.
Therefore I took some 'time out'. Within that time, my wife was diagnosed with a life threatening liver disease where the only available treatment would require her to have almost full time care for an unknown period. So those were the reasons I quit.

So during the next 6 years I could only do part-time work, financial related for previous clients, assisting in business startups, purchase, renovation and sale of one property, to finance the purchase and renovation of our current house.

I had been a gambler and London casino go-er since about 1988. I started collecting UK chips when I was gambling more regularly around 1998 or 99 with a friend who collected. He pointed out there only seemed to be one (occasional) UK based seller, who got what appeared to be very high prices for current $1 LV chips.
When things settled down at home, I decided to see what opportunities I could find for running a business from home. I just happened to 'explore' casino chips as an option and found there were still no UK based sellers but there were a number of ebay buyers paying what seemed to be outrageous prices. I found a US ebay seller who was prepared to sell me chips in bulk at a favorable price and quickly built up a customer base. I also sold chips from London casinos. Although I knew nothing about the club at the time, one of my earliest customers was Steve Bedo
I then decided I would make a trip to Vegas to buy a suitcase full of chips I asked the ebay seller that had helped me for advice. He offered to meet me in Vegas and we travelled round together. During that trip he introduced me to Gene. After a successful time selling the chips I brought back, I made another trip to Vegas, which by chance happened to be at convention time. I met Gene again, attended the last day of the convention for a couple of hours (just before flying home) and joined the club. Within a few months of that I was introduced to this bb and I guess the rest is history.

May not be the story you were expecting to hear but I guess it answers most of it