Some of this is a re-hash of information I have posted previously, but some of it is new, so please bear with me as I have a request at the end. But for the most part, I am posting this information in an effort to document some peculiarities of chip manufacturing and to share information that others might find interesting regarding our hobby.

So, this is my story... Some years ago (at least 10) Pam and I spent a fair amount of time at the Colorado Belle in Laughlin, NV. At the time, I was driving to Las Vegas every other weekend and to make the drive a little bit shorter, she would meet me in Laughlin. Sometimes we would spend the weekend, sometimes just a day, but over time I spent enough hours in the poker room that most of the dealers knew me by name, or that I collected chips!

Playing poker certainly has it's boring moments and to amuse myself between non-playing hands, I would 'align' my chip stack(s). Now the Belle allowed playing from a rack (not all casino do) and I would line-up my chips ($1's) in rows of 20, so that all the inserts were in a line. On one occassion I was surprised to see a chip that was missing a red insert, and the gap was filled with the white base material of the chip. Being an error collector, this was rather exciting and I pocketed the chip and began to start looking for more! To some extent, the purpose of trying to win hands was to be able to see more $1 chips, as opposed to just winning more money. When I was doing well, I had two racks in front of me. One for chips that I already viewed and the other rack for chips that needed viewing. I would only bet and call from the rack I had already viewed all the chips.

While I found nothing additional that time, I was lucky in that some of the regular players and dealers started to keep an eye out for these 'flawed' chips for me, and when I placed a bounty on them ($20), over time, whenever I would return to play, I was greeted with, "Hey Jim! Look what I found!"

Pictured here is the fruits of those labors, some found by me, some received as a function of my bounty offer and the piece-de-resistance (a no red inserts at all version) was a gift from the dealer that plucked it off the table on opening night in 1987!

With the exception of the "missing 1 red insert", these are all unique!

And now my request... Other than the Palace Station, I have not played anywhere else that uses Bud Jones, CIC chips, let alone playing for many, many hours on end. But I have to believe that the errors shown here have probably been repeated to some extent on other Bud Jones CIC chips. Is anyone familiar with similar error conditions on other Bud Jones chips? If so, please post a scan here, or let me know via email. But I can't believe that the Colorado Belle is the only example of these errors.

Thank for looking!

Jim

ps. I will be posting a scan of two other types of errors on these chips, as well as what I find to be rather interesting on the high degree of breakage for these chips. JF