Tom Sims did a lot of work on BARGE chips even before the BCC. He was an active participant on rec.gambling.poker, and every year, he’d share this, having been burned by quality issues with Chipco chips for the 1996 chips.
BARGE switched to Paulson as our vendor for the next few chipsets, then back to Chipco, when Paulson proved difficult to work with. Paulson no longer sells to non-casino customers. Chipco International has gone out of business.1 For the past several years, BARGE chips have been produced by BRPro Poker, who have been excellent to work with and produced a high quality product.
This has been lightly edited for presentation. The original is still available on Google groups.
Greetings From Las Vegas, Home of The BARGE:
MY ANNUAL CHIPCO MANIFESTO
The 1996 BARGE chips were designed by me, and made by CHIPCO International of Windham, Maine. CHIPCO was selected because we were looking for a “different look” and we had been favorably impressed with some samples of their work.
I believe that the 1996 chips look pretty good in their overall appearance, but they have several quality control mistakes that CHIPCO refused to correct:
On the red chips, the red color bled slightly into the bottom of the five of spades graphic on about 80 % of the red chips. This only happened on the red chips.
On all of the orange chips there is a slight discoloration extending to the left and the right of “HORSESHOE” in the Binion’s logo. This only happened on the orange chips.
The lettering on the edges of the chips was very sloppily done. The lettering was not centered vertically, and the print varied in degree of darkness on many of the chips. The lettering is not very crisp, is often blurry and/or smudged, and looks sort of like someone took a rubber stamp and stamped the lettering on the edge of the chips.
The lettering on the edges of 2,313 of the chips faces one direction while the lettering on the edges of the remaining 1,717 chips face the opposite direction. Each of the ten different colors had about half of it’s edge designs reversed in this fashion.
Many of the chips have some sort of minor blemish: a tiny pit mark, or a tiny discoloration (usually white) or an irregularity on the edge that looks like a seam, and other flaws in the manufacturing process. One peach chip had a large white discoloration (about 1/4" x 1/8") on one side.
I had been very pleased with the proofs of the BARGE chips. There wasn’t any bleeding or discolorations or blemishes on the proofs, and on the proofs the lettering on the edges was crisp, clear, vertically centered, and it all faced in the same direction.
After receiving the BARGE chips, I informed CHIPCO that they were unacceptable because of defects 1 through 4 listed above, and I requested that they redo the chips.
The President of CHIPCO put off a decision for over two weeks before refusing to redo the chips. He said that they put too much red ink in the mix for the red chips, that they let the orange chip cook a little too long, and that I never told them that all of the lettering in the edge design should face the same direction. He did not offer any comments or explanation of the sloppy lettering on the edge design or the blemishes on many of the chips. He said that in his judgment the flaws were not that serious and did not warrant redoing the chips. His basic attitude seemed to be that he was very concerned with his immediate profit and loss situation, and that the flawed chips that they had made for BARGE were “good enough for who they were for”.
CHIPCO does not accept credit cards, and required payment in full from me (except for shipping charges) before I got the BARGE chips, so I had very little financial leverage in this situation. If they had been dealing with a casino or an important customer, they would not have required payment in advance, and the chips would have been rejected for any one of the defects listed above. The Chip Purchasing executives at two major Las Vegas casinos looked at our 1996 BARGE chips, and said that they would have rejected the order because of the quality defects.
I spent many weeks trying to appeal to CHIPCO’s pride in their product and the desirability of maintaining a good reputation, and I really held out hope until the day before BARGE, that they might decide to do the right thing by us, and that a UPS truck would deliver some chips that looked like the proofs. I told them that they were capable of doing better work than the “seconds” they were foisting on us, and that we had paid for and deserved their best efforts. I also suggested that they could replace the edge lettering with stripes, if it was beyond their technical capability to produce edge lettering that looked like the proofs. This all fell on deaf ears.
Their short sightedness in this matter was/is unbelievable to me. Even after redoing them, they probably would have made a profit on the BARGE order, because I offered to try and sell the original chips as “seconds” and give the proceeds of the sales to CHIPCO. They also stood to benefit from several additional full set orders for which I had indications of interest. I don’t understand how any company could commit such a public relations blunder.
Based on my experience with CHIPCO, I conclude that they are a company with serious quality control problems, that doesn’t hesitate to foist a flawed product, that does not represent their best efforts, on their customers. What goes around comes around, and I believe/hope that the Poker God will get them in the long run.
Tom Sims
Measure with a micrometer * mark with chalk * cut with an axe
… Turtle Tom … Live From Las Vegas …
… “CHIPCO Quality” is an Oxymoron …