Setting a Chip Limit???

I wrote earlier about new collectors finding a focus for their chip collection. Over the past year or so, I've been thinking about tightening my own focus even more.

Anyone who flips through the latest edition of The Chip Rack can see there are thousands of chips that have been issued in the state of Nevada since gambling began there. Like most Nevada collectors, I've come to realize that unless I find some source of unlimited funds and find the time to purchase new chips full-time, I'll never have every known Nevada chip.

Of the chips already in my collection, there is a hierarchy of "personal value", i.e. how much I like them. The "personal value" may come from the mold or inlay used to produce the chip, which casino issued it, a special story behind how I acquired it, or any number of things. Some chips just mean more to me than others.

I've already done some focus-tightening, when I decided that non-Nevada chips didn't have as much "personal value" to me. So, I removed them from my collection and placed them in my trading stock.

A while later, I decided that trying to keep up with all new limited edition chips was costing me more than I wanted to spend, and the LE chips themselves didn't have much "personal value" to me. So, I quit buying LE's unless they're issued for an event that means something to me or I really like the chip design. The LE's that I already had that didn't meet this criteria when into my trading stock.

But, even with these focus tightenings, I am finding that I still have a lot of chips that are extremely common and don't have particularly appealing designs. So, I've been toying with the idea of putting a limit on the quantity of chips in my permanent collection.

Here's how it would work: Currently I have somewhere around 1,500 to 1,700 chips in my collection and another couple hundred in trading stock. I would decide to set an arbitrary limit of say for example, 1,000 chips for my permanent collection. This would mean I would have to review all of my chips, keeping only 1,000 in my permanent collection and moving the remainder to trading stock.

From that point, each time I acquire a chip that I want to put into the permanent collection, I have to remove one, keeping the total permanent collection at 1,000 chips at all times. As time went by, I would gradually improve the quality of my collection, while the liquidation of chips removed from the collection would provide a supplementary source of funds for purchasing new chips.

Step 2 in simplifying my collecting habits would be to liquidate all of my trading stock, which is something I may spend another year thinking about before doing. More on that later.