I think with the right leadership, making hard choices and with dedicated volunteers the club actually has a long future ahead of it.

And I think it's important that is does. The club is special and is worth fighting for. Someone once said 'you don't need a club to buy and sell chips'. I think it's more correct to say 'you don't need a club if the ONLY THING you want to do is buy and sell chips'. But if you want to learn about collectibles, if you want understand gaming history, if you want to connect to other collectors and share knowledge, the club is invaluable.

It's the reason why I and a lot of other people are pouring our time and energy into trying to make things stable, then making things better for members.

Will it always look and act the same way? Of course not! Like the people in it, the club will change and evolve. Just like the club of 2007 was not the club of 1990, the club of 2030 won't be the same of 2025.

People will often say 'young people aren't interested in collecting'. I think it's more accurate to say 'young people aren't interested in collecting in the same way older collectors did'. In researching the report the Membership Growth and Engagement Committee did in 2024 we found that there were around 104,000 sales annually on eBay of individual chips; 6,000 members across 2 Casino Chip collecting groups on Facebook; Poker Chip Forum had 12,000+ members (their site has had 2.3 million posts since 2013). Somebody's collecting!

The club grew, but the world grew even faster:

The problem is that the club isn't giving younger people a reason to join. They don't care about a printed magazine. Think of any younger person you know: how many printed magazines do you think they subscribe to? Does your house still get Time and TV Guide?

And until recently we gave away literally everything the club had developed in the ChipGuide. Why would people join if they are getting EVERYTHING on the ChipGuide for free?

We're trying to evolve and improve to show people the value of joining and engaging with the club. Value is the basic reason why people do things. What do they get for what they give? What do they get when they spend their $40 to join the club? In the past it was the only way to engage in the hobby. Not anymore.

And when people are thinking of joining and they look at the ChipBoard (which isn't the official forum, but is the most active), what do they see? What do they think when they see Life Members threatening legal action because they aren't going to get what they feel their entitled to?

You can go to Poker Chip Forum and read what they think, it's not pretty. And we have sometimes publicly said "well they're not real collectors". What do you think that does for their perception of us?

Change is hard, I get that. And I'll be the first to say the club doesn't always manage it perfectly. Sometimes it tries to manage it but trying not to change. And when it's forced to, the change is even more dramatic than it has to be.

The world is changing and the club needs to change in response to it...or it will be left in the dustbin of history.