What is in the box? (1 Viewer)

DrStrange

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Sometimes buying poker chips is like a box of chocolates, you can't be sure what you are going to get. . . .

Late one night a buy it now auction pops up in my eBay feed. $130 bucks. There are several pictures of this box, one with it open but very blurry. The listing says these are L&M chips. There is a grimy plaque on the box, but unreadable in the pictures. Looks like 500 chips in the box. Listing was from North Carolina.

As we know, I didn't wait around since this thread is here but I am interested in people's guesses what in is the box. I had some wild dreams . . . Let me say this poped up just a few weeks after an awesome custom set of Disney chips sold for a big big price. I also didn't try to recreate the crummy pictures


You aren't going to wait long - - - DrStrange
 
I had been dreaming of a custom set for L&M cigarettes. (my dreams colored by the Disney set, made to honor the fruit juice stand in the park not the Disney cartoon characters.) The location is right and the box looked nice but that wasn't to be.


Someone bought a nice set of Paulson Home Chips. In my imagination it was a gift from Leo's mistress Maria, but more likely it was his wife's gift to him. I do not know what this type of set might have cost, but I (wild) guess somthing around $700 - $1,000. And is was a long time ago.


~500 solid Paulsons in excellent, not mint condition. As we can see, the box is impressive and typical of the Home Game product. A box like this seems like it always means a Home Paulson Set.


The chip rack lifts out of the box, a very nice feature. It is real wood and stoutly made to hold the weight. I can't say as much for the hinge/screws those had been upgraded by the original owner.


Individual chips: 50 $1s, 50 $5s, 150 $25s 100 $50s 100 $100s & 50 $1,000s Keep in mind these are older than the Moneymaker tournament boom. Someone bought these for a cash game and thought the breakdown suited the game. I imagine these chips have tales to tell . . . The wearing on the $1,000 chips looks like they were rarely used (if ever).

As can be seen, I didn't take time to ask questions or get better pictures because I thought this auction wouldn't suvive the night. As I recall it was posted about midnight on a Tuesday night.

So here you go, the first of my orphan chips.

DrStrange
 
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What an awesome set! Looks like the $25 are in abundance....would you agree that this was probably the workhorse chip. If so that's one helluva home game, given the period these chips were probably purchased (my guess is 70's or 80's), crazy stakes for a home even still today IMO
 
Very nice set. The breakdown really makes me wonder if it's not a tournament or fantasy value set though. Was that a completely unknown concept prior to the 90s?

I couldn't find the old paul-son custom hotstamps advertisement that someone scanned on CT. I thought it had prices that were less than $1 per chip in the early 90s, but I could be wrong.
 
Hold'em wasn't widely played back in the day, mostly it was draw and stud. Those games had antes, bring-ins and then played fixed limit or pot limit.

So I could see the set playing a 7-stud / 5-draw / 5-stud game with $2 ante, $10 bring in and $25/$50 fixed limits or $2 ante, $10 bring in and pot limit. Either way the game would have been huge by the standards of the day.

I have played poker since the mid 1970's. I never played a tournament until 2004 (or so). Obviously the poker world knew about tournaments given the long running existance of the WSOP. These players seem like they played is a totally different world than I did. I thought a $50 buy-in game was huge when I was a college student. These chips might have been tournament chips, but I suspect not.

For what it is worth, I have considered using them in a small tournament just to "let them out of the box" a few more times.

DrStrange

PS draw did not have a bring in, just antes and then bet once you get dealt a hand.
 

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