First, my comments and points were in contradiction of Cary's point and none of it was aimed at you or your position.

My point, entirely, was that Cary was saying the hobby was dying because the Club didn't allow it, but that if people really thought it was necessary to stay in the hobby, they would have slabbed their chips (which didn't happen). I now understand, but didn't when the anti-slabbing thing was still very prominent a topic, that slabbing is really only feasible for much higher end chips and not any of the chips I would collect. Some people have suggested that the high end collecting world left the chip collecting hobby because the high end chips weren't slabbed and they couldn't guarantee they were getting what they thought they were paying for. From my vantage point, it seemed that many high end collectors left the hobby when a flood of people left the hobby, right after the global financial crisis, a period when chip prices went way down. I don't know if the really high end stuff even went down at that time, but a bunch of big spenders seemed to disappear at that point, along with tons of low end collectors, having lost faith in the long term advisability of putting their money in chips. I never heard anything about slabbing in connection with their departure until a decade later (or more) and the timing did not coincide with the anti-slabbing position of the club. If the high end chip collecting world really wanted their chips slabbed and made it clear they would spend thousands of dollars on chips, but only if they were slabbed, I have no doubt that there would have been dealers willing to accommodate them. It seems to me to be a story created to discredit the club by people who are not members of the club, like Cary.

Do you disagree? Is it your position that the decline of club membership was caused by the CCA Board taking a position on slabbing?

Michael Siskin