The Chip Rack 20th Ed - On Sale Now ! (1 Viewer)

like 'it's worthless?' or 'you will never actually get it' or 'it's so good you just want to spend money on it?'
It’s worthless, the prices are all inaccurate/outdated and based on singles collectors. Generally just trash, even for singles collectors, but especially chip set collectors. You get prices of $80/chip for chips that you or someone else may have racks of that they bought for a few dollars/chip. Just pure, unadulterated, stinky poopy.
 
I agree it does have good information regarding when a chip was released, etc. Prices are subjective and even if accurate when printed, the market is too volatile and it could be wrong before delivery to you.

Generally, prices are too high, not too low.
 
It took me a bit to find what was actually inside of this book. I thought given the price and size of the book that it might be a nicely printed book of high res pictures of different chips from different casinos around the world with manufacturer, color codes from the manufacturer and codes for the spots.

Yeah, it isn't that at all.

LOL!
 
I have the 13th edition from 2011 and a copy of The Official U.S. Casino Price Guide, Fourth Edition. I agree with what other have stated around the actual price guide component of these books, its largely irrelevant. Check recent eBay and other auctions for more realistic and up to date pricing. However, I do enjoy flipping through the pages from time to time. The U.S. Casino Price Guide has some really neat photos and casino specific histories.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend spending $60 on the newest version, but as someone who enjoy the history component of collecting I can also certainly think of worse ways to spend $60.
 
It's not worthless. It is a great reference guide for Singles collectors of Nevada chips. I have been collecting for 17 years and find myself referring to it all the time. That being said, it will have little use to those that only focus on set or rack collecting, which are most of the folks here.

Related to prices, it is only a singles price "guide", but i would agree that most of the time, the singles prices are generally too high. I tend to discount the value based on my own experience. That is not unexpected, however, there are too many variables like condition and rarity, too many chips to track and the volume of chip sales is not a lot when compared to other collectibles like Baseball cards. Speaking of which, how many times have you looked at a Beckett price guide and said the same thing and that thing used to be printed monthly.

Love the US Casino Price guide as well but that has been out of print for at least 10+ years, so those prices are way out of wack.
 
It's definitely not worthless. There's still a lot of value in owning one. I reference it often. The prices are definitely laughable sometimes, or often rather, but they still usually at least give you an idea of directional accuracy if you keep in mind that the prices are almost all inflated. eBay is obviously a much better resource for realistic prices. But there's still a lot of value in owning a Chip Rack guide. I would just buy an older edition though. The incremental value you'd get from owning the current version vs an older one is fairly adjacent to zero.
 
Q: What is the scale of chip rarity? I know it's letters and numbers but from what to what?

The Chip Rack's letter is a "value code" and does not have any reference to rarity. For example A = $1-2, B = $3-4... to Z = $800+, then they have Z1-Z9 at various levels. I think this system was used to simply pricing on coin flips when dealers would sell chips at coin shows.

The US Casino Price Guide (which has been out of print for over 10 years), has a "rarity scale" which was used to estimate the quantity of chips that are known in the chipping community. Starts with R1 Extremely Common 2000+, R2 Common 751-2000 chips, all the way to R10 Impossible 2-3 known survivors. For the most part it was the author's best estimate with input from other dealers that he would rate them. Know that this guide is 10 years old, this ratings are pretty much obsolete.
 
Hello, this is my first post and I don't speak English. Sorry.

What advice would you give for starting a token collection?

I just wanted to buy this book, not to know the price of the tokens but just to have a lot of photos and explanations.

I wanted to buy this book on spinelli as well as about fifty various tokens.

Tokens ranging from $ 1 to $ 3.

Do you have better advice?

I am looking to collect for fun, not to sell and earn money.

I'll go get some single tokens.

No kit.

I would however like to find a WTHC token kit when my finances allow.

Sorry for my English. I use a translator.

Thanks.
 
The only thing I found these to be useful for is identifying certain chips, and gauging where the eBay prices come from. Alot of these "singles prices" are way high imo, but I guess the people of eBay all own one of these. And yes, generally speaking fairly outdated. As I always say, the "price" of the chip isn't what a collector values it at, it's what some body is willing to pay
 
It’s trash for people who don’t collect singles because... it‘s not written for people who don’t collect singles :nailbite:. That being said it shouldn’t be relied on heavily but instead used to give you a price range relative to other chips.

As others said the prices they mark are almost never the prices a chip would sell for in an auction besides a few outliers and some of the rarest chips. As for our of date, it’s a hard one to figure out. They do spend hundreds of hours every year updating it the best they can but as on PCF the markets always shifting and it’s a lot tougher for singles aa a single find of 100-200 chips could completely render their last update useless.
 

Create an account or login to comment

You must be a member in order to leave a comment

Create account

Create an account and join our community. It's easy!

Log in

Already have an account? Log in here.

Back
Top Bottom