I had to travel from Michigan to Urbana, Illinois recently for business. Having some extra time, I made a point of going to at least two casinos along the way to do some chip harvesting for my fellow chippers (I have collections from the casinos I was considering, but I wanted to help out my buds). Four Winds would've been easiest, since it's directly off I94; but since I loathe that place, I headed for Blue Chip Casino in Michigan City, Indiana first instead...
...noticing for the first time that there was a nuclear plant across the way from the casino. After I saw the condition of their $1 chips, I wouldn't at all be surprised to find that those chips had been dumped into the nuclear smoke stack.
I dutifully went to the poker cage to get 100 chips just to sort through the rack for 10 decent ones. Those, my friends, don't exist. I was afraid to touch the chips in that rack; it looked like they had gone through a toxic dump. I thought Argosy was bad, but Blue Chip took the cake.
I moved over to the next window (Blue Chip has a dedicated poker room cage window right next to the "everything else" window), intending to get a few dozen .25¢ chips "to use as tips" - only to encounter the phenomenon I like to call The ChipTalk Effect: the teller told me that they were plumb wiped out of chips. The reason? "Some people keep coming here buying up all our .25¢ chips in bulk and never returning them!"
Bad ChipTalkers. Bad, bad ChipTalkers.
Not willing to give up quite yet, I walked over to the sole table that had a few "quarters" (mini-baccarat) and proceeded to use my silkiest voice to charm the female pit boss out of a few of her lovelies. She was as nice as can be, but plead that the 60 or so chips they had on the table, were all they had in the entire casino. "We have more on order," she said (much to my delight), "but this is all we have." And with that, all I could do is wait until the big boss let her sell me a dollar's worth of the best chips she could find (bless her heart!), and sulk off to Urbana.
I'd like to say that the return trip was more successful. It was, but only marginally.
I stopped this time at Resorts East Chicago--
--hoping for the best, but ultimately being disappointed again. The $1s were similarly untouchable, though I didn't have as much of a problem getting a few more "quarters" from the baccarat area (right behind the poker room, btw). The teller there told me to come back later to see if they had more, but unfortunately, $2.50 worth was all I ended up leaving with (and I traded two of those in, as they were substandard).
I did learn that Resorts will become Ameristar on the 26th, but I don't have any word on whether the chips will change (I would suspect they will eventually, though).
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