Help identifying age of these Paulsons (1 Viewer)

[chuqii]

So I collect some vintage poker chips but picked these up at an auction. I don't know much about Paulson chips, so I'd appreciate any help in dating these and confirming the color names. Boxes have a Paulson brown paper label and are named Orange, Horizon Blue and Dark Green, but I don't know if those were official names or not. You guys are the experts. Any info would be appreciated.

 

[LeLe]

These are called Starburst, they are around $1 and more depending on the rarity of the colour and condition

 

[FDLmold]

Age, given the dot matrix printing on those labels, I'd say from the early to mid 1990s.

 

[kmccormick100]

Those colors look spot on with the names. Guessing these are probably from the 80’s-90’s sometime, what we call leaded chips which are nice and heavy and desirable. Probably $1-1.50/ chip depending on the color

 

[allforcharity]

Yes, those are official colour names. Yes, those are extremely nice condition, leaded Starburst chips. 2-3 years ago I would have killed to get these. I hope you got them at a really good price.

 

[Kid_Eastwood]

Very nice find !

 

[HaRDHouSeiNC]

Green looks like the starburst over canceled something else

 

[Marius L]

Orange and blues should be worth a bit more than the dark green. Those colours are harder to find, while the dark green is one of the more common solid coloured paulsons.

Nice find!

 

[chuqii]

Thanks for all of the info.

Green looks like the starburst over canceled something else

Good catch on the Dark Greens. About half of the Dark Greens have a horseshoe around a diamond and then the starburst on top of that.

 

[CrazyEddie]

Starburst is not an official Paulson name, but it's what we collectors call those types of chips.

The chips are "solids" meaning each one is all a single color, as opposed to being "spotted" meaning having multi-colored spots around the edge of the chip.

The chips are hotstamped, i.e. having designs stamped onto the chip surface using metallic foil, as opposed to having inlays.

The Starburst design is a cancellation stamp. Paulson uses that design to cancel chips and ensure they can't be inadvertently mistaken for live chips worth a cash value at a casino. Sometimes a casino will retire chips, and instead of destroying them, have Paulson stamp them with the starburst cancellation stamp. Here's an example:

Besides its use as a cancellation stamp, though... For a while, Paulson sold chips at retail to home customers. The retail chips had simpler designs than the chips they sold to their casino customers. They were usually solids and usually hotstamped. They were never blank, though; as a security measure, Paulson would work hard to ensure that a blank, unstamped chip never left their factory, out of concern that it could be tampered with and used to produce a fake chip that might end up getting cashed at a casino. So even if there were no other graphic designs on it (either inlaid or hotstamped), at the very least they would make sure it had the starburst cancellation stamp.

So chips like the ones you turned up - solids with the starburst hotstamp - were originally sold to home customers through Paulson's retail channels.

Sometimes those chips were produced specifically to be sold at retail, like the orange and blue chips you have probably were. Other times, Paulson ended up with "factory seconds" - chips that were intended to be delivered to a specific customer but for some reason weren't, perhaps because the order was cancelled or the customer wouldn't pay. Those chips were then stamped with the starburst hotstamp and tossed into the mix of chips that ended up being sold at retail. The green chips you found are like that - if you look closely you can see that there was a different pattern initially stamped into the chip (the one that the customer ordered) but then later the starburst pattern was stamped on top of the first one to cancel it. We call these types of chips "overstamps" and they are somewhat less valuable to Starburst collectors than those that have just the starburst stamp and nothing else.

This google search will turn up lots of interesting posts about these types of chips: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:pokerchipforum.com+starburst

Congratulations on your find! I hope you enjoy them and/or get a good price for them if you sell them to someone else.

 

[chuqii]

Thanks, Eddie. Learning more and more.

 

[HaRDHouSeiNC]

Thanks for all of the info.

Good catch on the Dark Greens. About half of the Dark Greens have a horseshoe around a diamond and then the starburst on top of that.

Those horseshoe stamps I think were more Paulson samples or home chips

You see those around a lot too

 

[Colquhoun]

Green looks like the starburst over canceled something else

Yep, looks like the horseshoe with a diamond in the middle, like in this post:
https://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/paulson-green-hotstamps.70844/

 

[HaRDHouSeiNC]

Yep, looks like the horseshoe with a diamond in the middle, like in this post:
https://www.pokerchipforum.com/threads/paulson-green-hotstamps.70844/

Curious why they cancelled a sample or home customer chip
So unnecessary it’s not a casino chip and is already stamped once by them like just so ridiculous to wreck a nice hot stamp I know they handed out or sold

 

[Colquhoun]

Curious why they cancelled a sample or home customer chip
So unnecessary it’s not a casino chip and is already stamped once by them like just so ridiculous to wreck a nice hot stamp I know they handed out or sold

View attachment 916968

Maybe to show as a sample what a cancel looks like?

 

[HaRDHouSeiNC]

Maybe to show as a sample what a cancel looks like?

Yah gotta test and burn in the machines

 

[allforcharity]

Curious why they cancelled a sample or home customer chip

They canceled all sorts of things, even generic roulettes. Maybe they had someone on payroll who only ran the cancel stamp machine, and they had to give him/her work to look productive.

 

[Colquhoun]