Casino Memorabilia Buffs Hit Jackpot at Vegas Expo

LAS VEGAS (June 25) -- Perched at a table at one end of the exhibit hall, Bob Ensley was offering a 52-year-old bar of soap from the Sahara, still in its original wrapper, for $8. On the opposite side of the room, Mike Christensen had scribbled a price of $35,000 on the edge of an 80-year-old mustard-and-black $5 poker chip from the long-gone Boulder Club casino in Vegas.

Between the two booths was a vast array of casino-related memorabilia as eclectic as the wares offered by Ensley and Christensen, from swizzle sticks and ticket stubs to room keys and postcards. And to the thousands who will browse this weekend at the annual Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club convention at the South Point resort, the whole point is to pick up -- or just ogle -- a big or small artifact of gambling history.

"For a lot of people, it's the history behind all these items and the casinos they're from," said Debbie Harber, 50, who started collecting with her husband in the 1980s, when they would take trips to Nevada casinos and bring home chips as souvenirs; today they own thousands of items. "You wonder who might have played with these chips. You never know."

The idea that things like casino chips could appreciate in value -- let alone that particular chips could be worth tens of thousands of dollars -- is relatively new. In many cases, collectors were accumulating items long before they realized others were doing so, too. The Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club, which has chapters around the world, only held its first international convention in 1992, around the time that the earliest forms of the Internet gave rise to a trade network for chippers, as hobbyists call themselves.

The market has seen another important change, too: Casinos used to be hostile to collectors, refusing to let them buy chips at the cage because it seemed inappropriate to sell to non-players; now they understand that they can reap a huge margin on, say, a $5 chip that cost them $1 and that will never be cashed out.

There have been some high-water marks in the history of chipping. At the 2007 convention, New York lawyer Eric Rosenblum sold a $100 chip he picked up in the 1980s at the now-defunct Desert Inn casino for $20,000. In 2008, a Missouri woman found a 45-year-old $1 chip from the Showboat Casino, once a Las Vegas mainstay, in her jewelry box and sold it on eBay for nearly $29,000. In October 2005, the so-called Platinum Collection of 6,600 casino chips and tokens from the 1930s to 1950s sold on eBay for $1 million.

As with coin collecting, however, most items are worth far less; some 150-year-old chips made of bone from Europe have been offered for as little as 50 cents apiece. Many chippers pick a specific genre, from chips with animals on them to $1 chips from Nevada casinos to chips with cryptic monograms used in underground casinos in the early-20th-century illegal gambling hotbeds of Chicago, Miami and Kentucky. Dealers frequently become historians, providing oral dissertations on, say, how certain ivory chips were designed and decorated.

If most of the convention floor is occupied by displays of chips, Ensley's bar of soap shows there's certainly much more on offer here. Ensley's favorite item for sale is a menu from a 1971 Elvis Presley performance at a dinner theater at the old International Hotel in Las Vegas. (The lobster tail entrée cost $15, FYI.) Steve Bowling of Los Altos, Calif., has a nearly century-old deck of playing cards with shirtless pictures of famous boxers of the day, including Jack Dempsey. And Phil Samano of Cleveland was thrilled with his $10 purchase of a colorful old menu from the Landmark resort, which was shuttered in 1990.

"I guess I'm on the young side around here," said Samano, 38, who has spent about $4,000 on his collection. "People of our generation don't really recognize how much better it was in the past in Las Vegas. Part of collecting these things is that it allows me to relive memories from those days."

Some, like Wendy Schultz of Henderson, Nev., were thrust into the hobby by circumstance. In 2005, when her parents died within months of each other, she discovered that her father had amassed what was believed to be the world's fourth-largest collection of slot tokens. Her parents' home was crammed with all manner of casino-related tchotchkes, too, from ashtrays to decks of cards.

"I don't think we'll be able to get rid of all of it in our lifetime," Schultz said. "I'm just sorry I didn't have more conversations with Daddy about the history of these pieces. They're all so fascinating."

While Christensen is believed to be selling the most expensive item at the show -- that 1930s-era $5 poker chip from the Boulder Club -- he also has his eyes open for a particular treasure, a white $100 chip from the 1946 opening of Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo. There's only one problem: Nobody even knows if any exist, and no collector has ever acknowledged owning one. There is a manufacturer's record of minting some, however.

"I hear there's maybe one out there somewhere, but I don't know if that's even true," Christensen said. "That's my holy grail, anyway. Maybe I'll find it one day."