Chips have benefited Rizzo personally. From the sale of his first chip collection, he made the down payment on his home. He also has an old Dunes chip he thinks was among the batch extricated when the hotel was blown up. According to legend, thousands of chips had been embedded for years in the cement floor of the Dunes' Oasis gaming area. There also are chips from the old Thunderbird hotel from the 1950s that served as business cards for casino executives.
Chips tell the gaming history of Las Vegas.
Steve Cutler, curator at the Tropicana's Casino Legends Hall of Fame, has about 12,000 chips, some of them going back to 1931 when gambling was legalized in Nevada. During the past five years, he has seen the hobby of chip collecting boom in Las Vegas because of the popularity of gaming throughout the country and the trend toward limited edition chips, a practice started by the MGM Grand in the mid-1990s. Cutler estimates there were about five serious collectors in town in 1994. The longtime Las Vegan has seen his own likeness printed on a chip. The implosions of longtime casinos starting in the mid-1990s have raised the value of chips, too.