Help required from UK chippers (1 Viewer)

[Skips]

Hello all! I am new to PCF and a relative poker chip newbie. I picked up some chips on a FB marketplace listing recently and I am wondering what exactly I have purchased.

From the photos in the listing, I had been expecting a 10g ceramic chip like these here: http://themogh.org/cg_quickview.php?id=ukxxgc&series=11.

What I ended up taking home were these 12g chips below. I knew before I handed over my cash that they weren't quite what I was expecting but there is such a dearth of decent quality chips in the UK (let alone casino used) that I still thought it was worth the money. Does anyone have any idea what I might have? Are these genuine Gala Chips or could someone have made a very niche knockoff?

Oh and if anyone has any advice on where to find some actual quality poker chips UK without having to fork out on shipping and duty, I'd be all ears!

Thanks in advance!

 

[CrazyEddie]

The chips you got look like they're injection-molded; from the picture it looks like they have a recess with a printed label, and the two-tone chip underneath the label is molded from two colors of plastic. Ceramics would be perfectly flat with printing across the entire face, with the entire chip being molded as a single piece out of white plastic.

Assuming that's the case...

According to ChipGuide, Gala Casino has used that same mold before, for these chips, listed as CG072337 and CG112531 :

The only difference between these chips and the ones you received are the colors of plastic used in the mold and the label stuck into the recess. But the mold is the same, and it's distinctive, suggesting that your chips and these two chips came from the same manufacturer, which suggests that they were commissioned by the same source, i.e. the casino. In other words, I strongly suspect that your chips are authentic based on this fairly limited evidence. It's possible they were a knockoff, but if so whoever made them did a very good job of duplicating the mold.

Remarkably, the labels are even aligned (i.e. the labels all have the same orientation relative to the mold). That's uncommon for cheap injection-molded chips, which quite honestly is what these look like. I wonder who made them; the mold doesn't seem to be one used by B&G, Bud Jones, RT Plastics, Abbiati, or Matsui, although I'm not perfectly familiar with all of their designs so I might be overlooking something.

It's possible that the casino commissioned both plastic and ceramic versions of some of their chips, and they just haven't turned up in enough quantity for there to be pictures of them all on ChipGuide yet.

The ones shown on ChipGuide that you thought were ceramics, though... I wonder about those. They're weird. The pictures show that their faces are textured, but the texture doesn't go all the way to the rim, even though the artwork itself does. I'm pretty new myself, but I haven't seen that before. It makes me wonder how they were manufactured, and by whom.

Welcome to the forum!

 

[Skips]

Thanks for taking the time to reply Eddie, this is all really helpful! I completely missed those two that you linked and I think you might be right - they appear to be an amalgam of the mold you linked and the design I thought I would be picking up. These would also be a pretty odd set for someone to ripoff!

And thanks for the welcome! I have already jumped straight off the deep end and have a set of Jack Cincinattis coming my way! And so it begins...