Welcome to the forum! Hide your wallet.
You might get some value from reading these three posts:
here,
here, and
here.
That's basically correct. Lots and lots of Paulsons have made their way onto the third-party market, i.e. us, and we trade them mostly in the PCF Classifieds section. Every now and then a new large horde of Paulsons is discovered or otherwise made available, so there's plenty to choose from... but demand continues to outstrip supply, alas.
That is it. There's no other options. There
used to be, but one by one those other options have become closed to us. Here's the sad story, in short:
Also, china clays are definitely not actual clay (neither are clays, but that's a different topic - see the posts above for details). China clays are made to be
kinda sorta similar to clays, and they're not bad, but they're definitely not the same.
Clay chips are compression-molded. This sets them apart from all the other options, which are all injection-molded. The compression-molding process creates a chip with characteristics that are difficult to counterfeit; it also makes them feel quite a bit nicer, in most people's subjective assessments. However, the compression molding process is also significantly more expensive - it requires a good bit of capital investment, a good bit of specialized technical expertise, and a lot of manual labor. Injection molding is, relatively speaking, quite a bit less expensive.
There actually has been, and continues to be, quite a bit of competition and market turnover in the poker chip business. There's been a number of innovations over the years. In the mass market, around twenty years ago there was basically just dice chips; now the variety of chips you can get from, say,
Amazon is staggering, with substantial quality improvements as well. The enthusiast market - i.e. people like us - have been well-served by a large number of new, high-quality chips produced by companies like PGI and Apache; these are the ones we generally call china clays.
The only segment of the chip market that's been stagnant or declining is casino clays. And the only people who care about that decline are us enthusiasts; the casinos don't mind, because GPI is still doing just fine and can sell them all the chips they need, and the mass market doesn't mind because they've got plenty of cheap chips that suit their needs just fine.
----
So. Is there room for a new clay manufacturer?
There absolutely is room. All you have to do is look at the lead times at Classic Poker Chips. Six to nine months, even longer in some cases. If someone else could enter that space they would have plenty of business; they'd take some away from
CPC but also increase the market overall by reducing lead times, and the market for high-quality home game poker chips seems like it's only going to increase, at least for the next few years.
But is it feasible? Would a new entrant be viable?
For the casino market, GPI has that pretty well locked down. They're the only provider of clay chips, which are still preferred by most casinos. They face some degree of competition in the casino plastics and casino ceramics from Abbiati and Matsui, but with their Bud Jones and Bourgogne et Grasset brands they're still the market leaders in those segments. A new venture certainly could try to compete with them, but it would definitely be an uphill battle. Not saying it can't be done, but I suspect it would take a market-disrupting innovation to gain ground. Note that once upon a time Bud Jones created just such a disruption by developing casino-quality injection-molded plastic chips, and then later Chipco did it again by creating ceramics. It could certainly happen again.
What about the home market, then?
CPC has a much smaller-scale operation than GPI. But even at that, they have a lot of equipment and operational know-how that they've accumulated and preserved across literally a century. It's safe to say that nobody is going to easily or cheaply duplicate what
CPC is doing right now.
But there's more than one way to skin a cat. All the clay chip manufacturers have made chips
more-or-less the same way, but the details have been dramatically different. There's nothing that says that a new entrant in the compression-molded clay chip market segment would have to use the same sorts of equipment, materials, and processes that
CPC or GPI use. There's room for a market-disrupting innovation.
But so far that innovation hasn't appeared. Or rather, it has, but it gave us china clays - which are a pretty reasonable economic substitute, and have been an absolute boon to chip enthusiasts like us, not to mention a market success - but they're just not quite the same.
Making something that's
enough like clays to satisfy those of us who
want clays is not impossible, and might not even be infeasible... but it's not going to be cheap or easy. Perhaps someone with the necessary entrepreneurial spirit (and the necessary financial backing) will step up to the plate in the near future.
Fingers crossed.