Most Beautiful Casino Racks (1 Viewer)

FDLmold said:
You know what I mean.

(image removed per google policy)

No no no, not that. These.

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So when I say casino rack, I mean it as the totality of all chips anywhere in the casino. Chips are art. Most casinos have a couple beautiful chips with some dogs, and some have nothing but a giant collection of disc-shaped turds. But then there are those casino racks that speak to your soul. You see every chip and you want to take them all home with you. THAT is what I mean by "beautiful casino rack".

I intend this thread to showcase what people consider the most beautiful casino racks. Please contribute your own, but try to include pictures of all the chips. Individually if you can, but in trays and racks if other images are not available. Some commentary is helpful as well.

Most folks around here hold the ARIA chips above in high regard. The five is a little weak and uninspired, but everything else is spectacular. The five would be a fine chip in most casinos I imagine. If Nevada changed their rules and allowed chips onto the free market after being retired, you would see a piranha frenzy over these.

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Lac Courte Oreilles Casino has been rebranded, these chips are not live and appear on eBay every once in a while. Maybe it is just the scan, but the five and twenty-five appear extremely bright to me. It would be a shame if they destroyed these chips when they retired them. They are all fantastic, except the 50c chip of course.

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These are my favorite Gardena CA chips. There are variations of a few of them, so I picked my favorites. I would pay a lot for a micro set with at least a rack each of 5c through $1 chips. TRK sweetness here! The casino closed long ago, but I think all these chips survived. Somebody here has this set below that makes me just a little jealous.

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Moving on

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These Soaring Eagle chips (Mt Pleasant MI) were not on my radar until recently. I obtained the 50c and both $1 chips in a transaction, mostly for the 50c chip because I collect casino fractional chips with inlays. The chips are RHC with textured inlays, and they started speaking to me. I went to chipguide to look at the rest and was very surprised. The second five dollar chip looks like it's on fire. The casino is open, but these chips are now obsolete. It's Michigan, and I think the chips get destroyed. Pity, because I'd buy buckets of the lower denominations.

That's all for now. Grand Casino Gulfport is the only one that comes to mind that I would have maybe added. Maybe another day.
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That's why we need an inside man when it does go.
 
Sprouty said:
What a d*ck.


:ROFL: :ROFLMAO:
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1640474265597.png
 
Spragg had the GN T5000 for sale for a bit but somebody paid the $150 for it a while ago. It's a beaut.
 
Every time this thread has showed up on my new posts search, I keep thinking I need to add my two cents worth, but finally got around to taking some pics of favorites in my collection last night to make a post useful and not just a bunch of words.

My personal favorite live one has to be the MGM Grand, and probably the live set that got me into being a chipper. :oops:

MGM-rack-small.jpg


First Pauson set with the gray/orange $100s that were removed from play after the events of "Bite Night". The rest are current, except the newer ones have the dumb small inlays but are otherwise the same. Baccarat chips on the bottom row.

The rest of the rack is below, via The Chip Board:

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39420.jpg
39421.jpg
39422.jpg


I've always loved the color matching on the lion to the base of the chip, and the rather clean and simple inlay design. Aesthetically, just about everything here makes me happy. This color matching was a very large contributor to my Arizona Club customs, but I chose to match the edge spots rather than the base color.




An early Stardust C&J rack. Great inlay design and shaped inlays all the way across. My only gripe is how tough it might have been to tell some of these apart in stacks, especially the $1 and $5 having similar colors. As far as I can tell, there were no higher value denoms in this particular issue.

Stardust-early-rack-small.jpg



If not the first issue, a very early issue form the Tropicana. Delicious small crown goodness, shaped inlays except the low value chips and that gorgeous and iconic fountain design on the inlays. Also, a glowing example that sometimes less is more when it comes to chip design.

Tropicana-early-rack-small.jpg



There. I feel better! I'd been needing to do this for a while now!
 
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I believe those are marked as such so they are only used in the poker room. I'm sure they'd cash them at the main cage, but if you tried to use a $20 chip at the craps table, they'd probably look at you funny.

What's strange is the $3 drop chip isn't marked as such, but those aren't supposed to be in the hands of players anyway.
 
I hate for this thread to go much longer than a month with no action.

King International Aruba. Leaded Paulsons! Strange they had no $500. And some of these chipguide scans are ass. I don't think they take much away from how good these chips are though. There are some full sample sets out there.

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I don't *think* I've mentioned these chips yet. It's possible though. In a six-page two-year-old thread, you forget things.

At any rate, we are in London, England, in the late 1960s today. The currency is British Pounds Sterling, pre-decimalization. There were 20 shillings in a pound, and 12 pence in a shilling.

There are better casino sets of TRK weighted small crown chips than these, but very very few.

1649463238472.png


(images from chipguide)

IMG_2288.jpg


(that's my image, chipguide go away)

A worn chip, over 10.5 grams, yessir give me more please. The bad news is these are scarce. Except for the 10/- chip, they are all at least $100 singles. (A 5-pound chip recently went for $140 on feeBay). A full sample set would be at least $1000, if you could find one! But my oh my, what beautiful beautiful chips.
 
FDLmold said:
I don't *think* I've mentioned these chips yet. It's possible though. In a six-page two-year-old thread, you forget things.

At any rate, we are in London, England, in the late 1960s today. The currency is British Pounds Sterling, pre-decimalization. There were 20 shillings in a pound, and 12 pence in a shilling.

There are better casino sets of TRK weighted small crown chips than these, but very very few.

View attachment 892667

(images from chipguide)

View attachment 892668

(that's my image, chipguide go away)

A worn chip, over 10.5 grams, yessir give me more please. The bad news is these are scarce. Except for the 10/- chip, they are all at least $100 singles. (A 5-pound chip recently went for $140 on feeBay). A full sample set would be at least $1000, if you could find one! But my oh my, what beautiful beautiful chips.
Click to expand...


There’s was a $5 on eBay few days ago and I wanted it but the bidding went way higher than I expected
 
I just looked and saw it went for $544 so I’d say a sample set might be closer to $3000 for a full sample.
 
joeyshin said:
There’s was a $5 on eBay few days ago and I wanted it but the bidding went way higher than I expected
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That bidding was correct, and about what I expected. Maybe even a little low @$140 for that chip. About the only thing these chips DON'T have going for them if you are an American collector is the weird-ass currency.
 
FDLmold said:
There are better casino sets of TRK weighted small crown chips than these, but very very few.
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I gave you a love for this, but the more I think about it, the more I think I'm less enthusiastic.
They're awesome because they're TRKs. And because Playboy is iconic.
But there's nothing about that inlay (aside from the iconic playboy logo) that is at all interesting to me. The fact that the inlays are different colors IS interesting, but the actual execution of the different color inlays isn't spectacular.
They're cool chips for sure, but better than other TRKs? I dunno.
 
upNdown said:
I gave you a love for this, but the more I think about it, the more I think I'm less enthusiastic.
They're awesome because they're TRKs. And because Playboy is iconic.
But there's nothing about that inlay (aside from the iconic playboy logo) that is at all interesting to me. The fact that the inlays are different colors IS interesting, but the actual execution of the different color inlays isn't spectacular.
They're cool chips for sure, but better than other TRKs? I dunno.
Click to expand...
Sounds like an idea for a thread. The TRK small crown casino rack showdown.
 
FDLmold said:
Let us take a moment today. A moment to daydream wistfully about a time. A time in Atlantic City before the gaming authorities made every casino with clay chips use an ugly house mold. It was a short time, very short. 1978 to 1979 and that’s about it.

View attachment 900047

Better times indeed.
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Love these chips.

Have a couple secondaries I’d trade for $25/$100 primaries if anyone’s got them.
 
Was browsing Caribbean chips this week. I found one from Haiti that I liked, so I checked out the rest of the casino in chipguide. There wasn't much...

1657334079674.png


I love these two chips. Unfortunately, that's all we've got. Chipguide has sod all for other information. I wish there was a Paulson historian with access to records who would share information with us. When did this casino order chips? What do the rest look like? I'd love to know.
 
I found this: "In the very late ‘70s, early ‘80s I had visited on numerous occasions Habitation Leclerc, a 5-star hotel in Port au Prince, Haiti. Habitation was part of the so called “champagne past” of the island, when Olivier Coquelin (he's got his own wikipedia entry, though it is pretty short) the owner and “master-of-ceremonies” of Hippopotamus, a famous disco at the time in New York City, decided to build two super deluxe hotels on the island; the above mentioned Habitation Leclerc comprised of groups of suites built around a number of swimming pools inside a walled, very large botanical garden near the center of Port au Prince, and Le Relais de L’ Empereur at Petit Guâve, a secluded cove on Haiti’s coast."

So it was a place for high rollers.
 
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