Most Valuable Las Vegas Casino Chips
The chips at Las Vegas casinos are worth less money when they close. However, their collection value frequently rises. This explains why $25 worth of Tropicana chips are currently selling for $50 on eBay.
One extremely uncommon chip has a 15,000-fold difference in value between its monetary and collectible forms.
Similar to those who collect comic books and baseball cards, hundreds of thousands of casino chip collectors come together for conventions and organizations around the world to pursue their passion.
These three items are their holy grails.
1. Golden Goose
$5 Chip, 1976-77
Price: $75,000
Herb Pastor opened the Golden Goose in 1975 at 20 Fremont St., the location of the now-closed Mecca Slots casino.
Other than a single blackjack table, it was a slots-only establishment. Only the period from March 1976 to August 1977 was covered by that table.
All of the chips on the table vanished along with it, with the exception of this one, which was purchased by an unknown bidder at the 2014 Casino Chip & Gaming Tokens Collectors Club (CCGTCC) convention from an unidentified vendor.
It was a one-of-a-kind item that broke the record for the most expensive casino chip ever. (The same chip fetched $3,000 at auction in the mid-1990s.) Before Pastor merged the Golden Goose with the Glitter Gulch Casino to become the Girls of Glitter Gulch, a strip club, it was open for business for five years.
2. Lucky Casino
$5 Chip, 1963-67
Price: $52,500
During the same year and convention (CCGTCC), the Golden Goose sale was closely followed by this $5 chip. There are just two known examples of its kind that still exist.
At 117 Fremont St., the location of the former Frontier Club and Lucky Strike Casino was the site of the Lucky Casino when it debuted in 1963. It only lasted four years before the Golden Nugget bought it and demolished it as part of a block-long expansion in 1968.
3. Showboat Casino
$1 Chip, 1960-61
Sold for: $28,998.88
A widow on Social Security, Sandy Marbs of Maryland Heights, Missouri, found eBay in 2008 as a means of making some extra cash. This chip came from the Showboat Casino, which was located along Boulder Highway and ran from 1954 until 2000. It was one of the trinkets she found scattered about the property.
For forty-seven years, Marbs stored it in her jewelry box because the boat on it brought back memories of Missouri. It was only the third $1 chip from the casino—which went by the name Castaways from 2000 to 2004—that was known to have survived. (The property was demolished in 2006, and apartments were built there in 2021).
When Marbs put the auction up for bid at $2.25, he was flooded with messages requesting that it be ended in return for a cash payment. The bids were between $1,000 and $5,000.
Fortunately for Marbs, one response came from a member of the CCGTCC, who encouraged her to let the sale go through and increased her chances by uploading better images of it.
It hasn't turned up for sale since it was purchased by collector Glen Grush.
Chip Claims That Could Be Inconsistent
Note that in 2008, the New York Times revealed that Eric Rosenblum, a lawyer from Long Island, sold a $100 Desert Inn chip from the 1980s for $20,000 at the CCGTCC convention.
Casino.org was not able to confirm that report. Additionally, Steven Cutler's 2022 claim to the Las Vegas Sun that he possesses a $30,000 chip from the former California Club from the 1950s was not credible.
In 2024, the South Point Hotel Casino in Las Vegas will host the Casino Chip and Collectibles Show from June 13–15. For additional information, go here.