Truman's House

Truman's House

Owner: Bergs

In 2009, I decided to make a chipset that would feature the first four-legged member of my family, Truman the Bulldog. I started really designing the set in earnest in early 2010. J5 designed the inlays and I built a small solid chip micro-cash set that I've since given to a friend. I loved the inlays and knew I needed to build a proper cash set with edge spot progression and better color choices.

JButler, Courage, JM, and others contributed many ideas to my chip design. I chose the Horsehead mold because I loved the look and texture of them in Courage's "Club Courage" set and in "Cedar Room" set. The latter was a major inspiration in my wanting to build my own custom set. I also wanted to pay homage to several live casino chips that I was really fond of. The 25c chip evolved significantly throughout the design process but I always stayed with the 3T316 edge spot after falling in love with the Mandalay Bay $1. The $5 chip in my set was directly driven by the design of the Caesar's Palace $5. There was a fair amount of constructive criticism regarding the $5 chip design, and I did change the edge spot slightly which I think greatly improved the chip. It's still my 2nd favorite chip in the set. I designed the $20 chip after seeing the Aria $100 chip on a late night poker TV show. I loved the way it popped and I really wanted my $20s to stand out when they hit the table. I struggled with the decision to use a $20 chip versus a green $25 chip as I'm somewhat traditional (normally) in my chip preferences, but the Courage and others convinced me that I'd appreciate the $20 when I was banking bigger games, and they were right. I also had a nickel chip with a grey base color and simple design that I used for smaller home games.

I ordered about 1800 of these in mid 2010 and drove up with JM to take an ASM factory tour in Maine when I picked them up. Great time, got to learn a lot about making chips and still have a Truman's House $1 slug that I sometimes use as a card capper.

In late 2010, I decided to expand the set to add a rack of $100s. I used the Dunes $1K chip (still my favorite chip of all time) as the basic design and got special dispensation (at the time) to create an unusual 8 spot chip that featured 4 different colors. Also in late 2010, I added on about 900 $1 chips to support mixed limit games which I spread 2-3 times per year.

In 2012, we moved to an adjoining town and I realized that my game had grown and I needed to add some additional $5 workhorse chips. J5 helped me with an updated inlay design that reflected the name of my new town on the bottom of the chip, and had some great ideas about using a larger inlay with the Horsehead mold. JimB at ASM was very flexible in letting me build 300 chips with the 312318A edge spot, so I kept the same colors and used this spot pattern, which looked fantastic. I also had an additional 200-300 chips made with the larger inlay on my traditional $5 spot (3UV3). This rounded out my set to approximately 200 nickels, 400 quarters, 1500 dollars, 900 $5s, 200 $20s, and 100 $100s.

I had played around with the idea of a dedicated limit set for quite a while in prior years, and I also wanted to get a commemorative chip created for my annual poker tournament and meat-up (Bounty Battle on the Border). For the 5th incarnation of the BBotB event, I worked with J5 in late 2014 to create a commemorative inlay with a new picture of Truman that both started off my limit set with a $2 chip and could be handed out to BBotB5 participants. I was always fond of the idea of a pink chip game, so even though it's not a proper snapper, I used a pink base for the $2 chip and chose complimentary edge spot colors that really popped well. I used edgespots in the $2 chip (3DSA18) that were smaller than the ones on the $1 chip (3DSA316) for differentiation purposes since the $2s would only play in limit games. The first 160 chips I ordered look great and I look forward to adding onto the set with the goal being 10 racks of the pinks sometime in 2015.

Future plans include a limited $500 chip (probably on a blue background), a $10 limit chip to serve as a colorup in $3/6 and $4/8 games (with a brown base) and I'm still trying to find a use for a green base chip - maybe a tourney set? A set is never done.
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