[CaptLego]

Well, I wish that "grime" could be blamed on potted plants or Duster oil, but it's just from the chips rubbing against each other.
I've put a lot more shuffles on other brands.. some (Dice, Steel City, RT Plastics, Chipcos) show no signs of this grime. I can see some wear on the edges of the Chipco graphics, but there is no discoloration. The Modern Clays show a little of this same behavior --- but much less than the Paulsons. The Paulson Wynn casino chips put blue bands across the white edgespots with just a couple hours of shuffling.

I have indeed been to a casino lately. Their chips are disgusting. That's why I said my samples were starting to look like real casino chips. The problem is, I don't want my home chips to look like that.

I washed the Paulsons, using a soft-bristle toothbrush and dishsoap. It took about 2 minutes per chip. They now look good as new. I'll start shuffling again....

[FetishGirl]

I believe they look that dirty because he has a sample set of diffrent denoms and he's been shuffling the light chips with the dark ones. Clay from the darker chips like the black $100 and purple $500 chips is rubbed off onto the lighter ones like the white $1 and orange $1000 chip etc. On my ten $500 chips the purple clay, worn off from the edges, was mostly apparent on the edge spots because of their contrasting colors. Purple clay on a purple chip isn't that noticable even with some dirt mixed into it. But imagine how the purple $500 chips would look with white clay all over them. Then you'll get the picture

[CaptLego]

As Fetish Girl points out, I've been shuffling all the colors together. (I have 2 each of 7 colors). That's surely worse treatment than you'd normally expect, since at the table, you're likely to be shuffling chips all of the same color. But the contrasting edgespots will still cause discoloration (See FetishGirl's picture). Also, the buildup of the chip dust makes the chips kinda grimey, they start sticking together, and don't shuffle as smoothly.

My 1-day results may well correspond to what you'd expect to see in a year or normal use, since you're likely to be cycling through 200 chips, instead of constantly shuffling the same two chips.

But at this point, I don't expect the wear process to ever end. Some Paulson casino chips I have are really worn down --- the edges are quite rounded over. These chips are just basically softer than ofther chips.

Try the crayola test --- just take a chip and write on a piece of paper.

[Nanook]

Try the crayola test

I just did with chips from:
JB Paulsons - Same result
Old Paulsons from real casino - same result
ASM -same result
TR King - Same result
Blue Chip - much lighter (as would be expected, these seem very hard and this test would confirm that)

Same result = easy to draw on a piece of white paper.

I have observed that the colors on the Paulsons are the easiest to rub off on other chips of the 4 above mentioned chips.

AB