Highest Priced Casino Chips in Las Vegas
When Las Vegas casinos shut down, their chips lose their monetary value. However, their collector's value frequently skyrockets. Right now, you can find plain old $25 chips from the Tropicana listed for $50 on eBay.
One exceptional chip stands out: its monetary and collector's values differ by a factor of 15,000.
Much like baseball cards and comic books, numerous casino chip collectors from all over the globe congregate for events and form clubs in pursuit of their hobby.
These are their holy grails:
1. Golden Goose
$5 Chip
Price: $75,000
The Golden Goose was established by Herb Pastor at the former Mecca Slots casino location at 20 Fremont St. in 1975. It was a slots-only establishment, except for one blackjack table. This table operated only from March 1976 through August 1977.
Once the table was swept away, so were all its chips, except for this one, which was sold by an anonymous seller to an anonymous buyer at the 2014 Casino Chip & Gaming Tokens Collectors Club (CCGTCC) convention.
Considered unique, it holds the record for the highest price ever paid for a casino chip, an accomplishment that still stands today. (In the mid-1990s, the same chip was sold for $3,000 at an auction.)
The Golden Goose ran successfully for five years before Pastor merged it with the Glitter Gulch Casino into a strip club named the Girls of Glitter Gulch.
2. Lucky Casino
$5 chip
Price: $52,500
Also, at the 2014 CCGTCC convention, this $5 chip came in second place for the highest price paid for a casino chip. There are only two known survivors of its kind.
The Lucky Casino opened in 1963 on the same grounds as the former Lucky Strike Casino (and previously, the Frontier Club) at 117 Fremont St. It operated for just four years before the Golden Nugget purchased and demolished it during a 1968 expansion.
3. Showboat Casino
$1 chip
Sold for: $28,998.88
Back in 2008, Sandy Marbs, a widow on Social Security from Maryland Heights, Missouri, discovered eBay as a means to earn some extra income. One of the trinkets she found in her home was this chip from the Showboat Casino, which operated from 1954 to 2001.
She stored it in her jewelry box because the boat on it reminded her of Missouri for 47 years. It was only one of three surviving $1 chips from the casino.
Marbs began the auction at $2.25, attracting a swarm of inquiries about ending the auction in exchange for cash offers, ranging from $1,000-$5,000.
Fortunately for Marbs, a CCGTCC member offered advice to just let the auction naturally reach its conclusion, and even assisted her by uploading better images of the chip.
It was sold to a collector named Glen Grush and has not surfaced since.
Questionable Chip Claims
It is worth mentioning that in 2008, The New York Times reported that a Long Island lawyer named Eric Rosenblum sold a $100 Desert Inn chip from the 1980s at the CCGTCC convention for $20,000.
In addition, in 2022, casino chip collector Steven Cutler claimed to the Las Vegas Sun that he possesses a 1950s-era chip from the old California Club valued at $30,000. However, neither of these claims could be verified.
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