Yikes! This
really should be an easy decision, but as I think of it, it's a lot more difficult to decide.
(slowly scans the collection)
I have to punt and pick two. First, and definitely leans on the vintage side:
California Club, very early (maybe first issue, maybe second, but still early in the history of the club, early 1950s either way) $25 chip. These are quite rare, and was one of the Holy Grail's of my collecting for a long time. The photos don't show but the bear has a metallic printing on his body and the very unique logo-only on the obverse and the casino name and denomination on the obverse. Simply a remarkable early Vegas chip that is, in humbleness, the pinnacle of my collection.
If we are going for chips with a story:
...one of the infamous "Bite Night" chips from the MGM Grand.
The short story, after the Holyfield-Tyson II fight in June of 1997, when Mike Tyson suddently got a taste for human flesh, chaos ensued in the MGM Grand resulting in panic after people thought they heard gunshots. Tables were flipped, chips grabbed from tables, and gaming shut down for several hours to deal with the aftermath. It comes up in the book
Bringing Down the House, a telling of the famous MIT Blackjack team, when one of the members comes down the elevator at the MGM to their "shift" to find nobody is playing anything but the slot machines, but also:
https://web.archive.org/web/2009060...j_home/1997/Jun-29-Sun-1997/news/5632719.html
or
@Okku 's great video detailing the history:
https://www.pokerchipforum.com/thre...os-random-fun-stuff.66713/page-9#post-1739847
In the end, 19 of these avoided the dreaded Paulson shredderator and are in the wild, this one included that's in my collection.
I've daydreamed about the stories a casino chip could tell about fortunes won or lost if they were able to talk, but this one
absolutely tells the story with very little imagination required. It was either in somebody's pocket day-of and wasn't/couldn't be redeemed or was snatched from an overturned table in the chaos of the event. Either way, it's one degree of separation from an event that many of my generation remember seeing and reading about (yeah... I'm old and I'm mostly over it!
).