I spent a couple hours reading this site, and I'm in absolute awe of what some of you guys have done with your chips, and what amazing collections you've built.
Rather than commenting on various threads, I'm gonna continue my introduction here.
My gambling career started in the mid 90s in Europe. Most players have a few hero stories about their successes, but I'll admit freely that although I had some decent nights, I never got anywhere near meaninfgful profit. It was hard to find player-friendly Blackjack rules; 6 deck games had already become commonplace, surrender was practically unheard of, splitting and doubling down restricted, and limits were low. What's worse, the internet was in its infancy. You youngsters may now be used to it telling you how to eat your Tide Pods, but back then finding information and buying stuff required much more effort. We'd admire and occasionally chat up seasoned players (usually senior citizens who had basically become part of the casino furniture), which yielded occasional insights into their (often remarkably complex but completly pointless) roulette strategies, but more crucially, they'd occasionally share xeroxed newsletters with advice and addresses of suppliers. At some point, I bought a book on counting strategies (which also turned out to be xeroxed pages in a binder), which included the words of advice, "buy some gaming tokens and practice at home." And thus, my chip collection started.
I couldn't say where my first set of "chips" came from, but it was awful. Those cheap plastic markers in red/blue/white that a couple decades ago would have sold in the toys section of Rite Aid for $2.99 per pack of 100. It surely was a step up from nothing, but cutting up a sheet of paper and using the small pieces would have been very similar. A most disappointing start.
I then used the power of the internet (such as it was) to dig up addresses of gaming suppliers. Sent an email to a seller in Germany. No response. Sent an email (maybe fax!) to Bourgogne et Grasset. Nothing. Abbiati. Nope. Finally placed an order somewhere in the US in what would have been 1998 or 1999. Don't have receipts and don't recall the name of the vendor. It's quite possible that they made me run around to get an international money order and maybe they asked me to throw in a kidney. Whatever the hoops might have been, at some point my shipment was on the way to Munich way via UPS.
I'm sure there was no realtime tracking, but I had a rough idea when my chips were supposed to arrive. They didn't. What did arrive, a couple days later, was a letter from the main customs office at Cologne airport, advising me that I needed to file an import declaration. I had no idea what they wanted from me, so I declared my chips as "toys" and after while received a bill for 160ish Deutschmarks (around $80 at the time), paid it, and finally received my chips with a 2 week delay. It wasn't a very charmed beginning, and indeed I must say that I never quite warmed up to these chips:
After reading this site, I realize that people rave about these. TBH, I was disappointed. This is in part because I was socialized with Jetons, so the sound and feel was off. But I also found the workmanship depressingly poor. The print quality of some inlays was mediocre, and some were off center. In fact, and I'm sure I'll be banned for this, I threw out some of the worst quality chips. What bothered me more than the quality of the inlays, the color scheme an denominations just never made sense to me. It clearly wanted to be a European set with the 10-20-50 units, but why have the denominations top out at 200?! Having read many of the posts here, I appreciate that these are beautiful chips, and it could indeed be a great set with personalized inlays, but as it stood, I rarely used these. I made a salvage attempt by buying some 500, 1000, 5000 and 10000 of the King's Crown Series, but it felt weird playing with a mixed set.
I moved back to the US in the early 2000s and left these at my parents' house in Germany. Casinos were certainly more interesting in the US, but after a while I realized I wanted to have my own chip set at home. Ended up ordering some of the Isthmus City chips. Haven't touched them in years, but probably also 400-500 chips total. Unfortunately can't show any pictures at this point, because I left them at my ex wife's house.
We are on reasonably good terms, and although I couldn't get her to sort and take pics of them, I'm sure I'll get them back. I'm tempted to think up a way to turn them into a nice personalized set.
I'll stop here, because everything else I have is Jetons and a few coin inlay chips, which are quite stunning to me, but of no interest to most of you.
