Part one of my journey so far. If international shipping was easier/cheaper, I would probably have "rented" a few more sets during my time on here.
I started out playing with dice chips like most people when I was in high school with my buddies. This was when we first started playing poker around the age of 15, back in 2005 or so. After a while me and one other friend wanted to upgrade the chips and we did check out CT, but unfortunately considering we were poor youngsters with no income and hardly had enough money to play $5 sngs with the buddies every weekend, we decided against it. We did however order a couple of sample sets from a european vendor at the time (mrchipsEU?), just to check out some of the high end stuff. The samples were a couple different designs of ceramics, of which my favorite was some old style EPT replicas, and a sample set of paulson classics. I shuffled those samples sets for hours upon hours on my desk playing online poker way back when, while grinding the $1 sngs on pokerstars. One day another friend suddenly purchased a decent upgrade, which if I remember correct must have been some sort of early china clays? Some sort of star-mold, with paulson classics-like colors and euro-denoms. They were plenty good enough for us at the time, and after that I didnt think about chips for quite a few years.
Fast forward something like 8 years, and I suddenly got an urge to get a poker game going, and was starting to look back into buying proper chips. I remembered the CT site from years back, and also remembered that Paulsons were the best in the biz, so I try to do some research. I quickly realize that things have changed in the chipping world. Paulson are no longer selling chips to the public, and CT is just about dying. I soon find this place though, and start to lurk for a while before making an account and after a few months make my first purchase, - a casino used GV set. I get a great deal and feel content and happy that I finally have secured my own proper set of chips. However as I recieve them I quickly realize I need to add a rack of hundreds and some 500s/1000s to finish the set and make it perfect for my future game. After adding some higher denoms including a barrel of par a dice 500s (that I overlabled with labels from Gear), the set was complete. This was for playing 1/2 or 5/5.
$1x100
$5x400
$25x200
$100x100
$500x20
$1000x2
While I did enjoy the GVs, I was not in love with them, and I was still hanging around on PCF a lot. There were nice chips changing hands regularly as always, and I couldnt help but dream about something nicer. For some reason I really liked the bicycle tire GV $5s. They were so smooth to shuffle, and the salmon (?) edgespot was a nice touch. However both the $25s and $100s had way too much metal flaking for my taste and although the colors and spots on the hundo is pretty bonkers, I just couldnt get past those flakes. The sunset picture inlay was also pretty horrible to be honest.
In the autumn of 2016, the HS cleveland chips was released by Thechiproom. The hype was real, as you all know when Jim does a sale, and it had been quite a while since the last one. I dont know how long, but it was at least before i joined, which at this point was about a year ago.
I decided to list and sell my GVs to get some funds for the HS cleveland sale. And boy I was very happy that I did. I manged to score a really nice set directly from Jim in the first sale, and was super happy with the upgrade. I did a few small addons and ended up with a set I was really happy about. Even though I was not a huge fan of the black inlay, it was at least somewhat discreet and a lot nicer than the sunset inlay from the GVs. And this set had a lot to offer. I liked the colors of pretty much all the chips. The $1s had very nice colors and were my first
THC chips. I really liked their feel. I also loved the colors and spots of both the fives and twentyfives, although the latter had a hint too much wear for my taste. The bearclaw hundos were a bit muted, but still super nice and the "floral" 6pie $500s are really unique. The blazing and smooth oversized $1ks made a nice top end off the set, and the fact that I could even have a couple authentic $5ks and $25k made it all pretty special.
In time though, I started to crave a MINT set. The wobbly stacks of used chips, and especially the different stack heights between the denoms was starting to really annoy me. The chipping sickness was slowly getting worse....
