Selling chips

I've decided to sell off my poker chip collection. It's rare these days that I find one in circulation that I don't already have, and I think I've looked at them and gotten all the pleasure out of them that I'm going to get. They're kind of heavy and take up space, and I have a secret plan for what to do with the extra money.

Before turning to ebay, I thought I'd offer them here first. Based on previous posts I've done about collecting chips, I know that I have some readers who might be interested.

I kind of doubt that anybody would be interested in buying the whole lot in one fell swoop (though if you are, please contact me and let's see if we can work something out). At the other extreme, I can't stand the thought of trying to offer them for sale one by one, pricing each separately, working out shipping, etc., hundreds of different times.

So my thought is to start off trying to sell an entire casino collection at a time. I'll begin with the Palms, for which I think I have more different chips than any other place. The Palms also has a unique advantage: Next to the main cashier, they keep a display of all the chips they've ever issued, which serves as a reference guide for collectors. Unlike any other casino, then, I can be reasonably confident about how close to complete my set is.

I have never tried to collect anything other than $1 and $5 chips. I have one each of the two main different styles of $1 chips the Palms uses, though I'm lacking a commemorative issue that I didn't even know existed until I checked the chip board the other day.

In $5 chips, I have 151. My best estimate is that I am missing 14 that have been issued. At least four of these are very common ones, and when I checked the reference board against my collection, I was surprised to find that they are not to be found in my binders. Apparently what happened is that I got so used to seeing them in use at the poker tables that I assumed every time that I already had them stashed away. There is a little fudging in that 14-missing number because the photographs I took of the Palms chip boards had some glare and out-of-focus areas where I can't be sure of what I'm seeing; I'm confident, however, that the real number that I'm missing is not less than 11 and not more than 17 (i.e., there are only three spots I'm unsure of), assuming the display cases represent a complete set.

The display cases also showed three oversize $5 chips that have never circulated, but have only been available to purchase at the cashier cage. I have never attempted to find or buy those, so that's another three short of a truly complete set. But overall, if one were looking to assemble a complete collection of Palms $5 chips, what I have would get you about 90% of the way there.

Condition? They're all circulated, some more than others. I'm not fussy about condition, I just wanted to try to assemble as nearly a complete set as I could. I play at the Palms often enough that when there are new chips issued, I can and do almost always grab them within the first couple of weeks, so all the ones issued within the past five years or so (since I've been in town) are not quite mint condition, but you'd have to look closely to notice any wear. Older ones are what they are.

I have spent exactly zero time and effort searching web sites with chips for sale to try to determine which, if any, of these are considered to be hard to find and therefore worth more. My goal here is to make a sale quickly and easily, rather than squeeze every potential dollar of profit from the venture.

So here's what I plan to do: I'm setting the "reserve" price at $1060, which is $7 for each $5 chip, plus $3 for the two $1 chips to make the total an even number. The 8 1/2" x 11" 3-ring-binder plastic sheets in which I store them are included in the sale, and I'll cover shipping within the U.S., or deliver them in person if the buyer lives in Vegas.

If I get exactly one offer to meet that price, it's a done deal. If I get more than one person willing to pay that, I'll set up an informal auction with $20 minimal increments, conducted by email, until we have a winner. My email address is in the "profile" sidebar. Payment is to be via PayPal, or cash if we're meeting in person. No, I will not accept Full Tilt transfers!

I scanned my sheets of chips and posted the resulting jpegs below so that you can easily see what I have and don't have. Click on them for the full-sized versions. (The red rings in some slots do not represent ones I removed for separate sale, but are just places where I shifted things around into more logical groups for purposes of checking completeness. They were just in random order previously.) I'm not posting the photos I took of the Palms display cases, but I have them in case a serious buyer is interested.