Vintage Casino Tokens

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Casino tokens were first produced by the Franklin Mint for Harrah's Reno and Lake Tahoe casinos in 1965, when the rising price of silver made the use of actual silver dollars for gaming purposes problematic. Good only in the issuing casino, these...
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Casino tokens were first produced by the Franklin Mint for Harrah's Reno and Lake Tahoe casinos in 1965, when the rising price of silver made the use of actual silver dollars for gaming purposes problematic. Good only in the issuing casino, these coins could be dropped into slot machines or tossed on a card table to place a bet. Eventually, the coins themselves became collectibles, whether manufactured by Franklin Mint or companies such as Osborne Coinage, Michigan Tool & Engineering, Product Engineering, or Wendell's. Some of the most sought vintage casino tokens from the late 1960s include the dollar slot tokens minted for the Nevada Club in Reno, the Nugget in Carson City, and the Thunderbird and Silver Slipper in Las Vegas. But this first heyday of the casino token was short-lived thanks to the arrival of the Eisenhower or "Ike" dollar in 1971. While millions of collectible strikes of the Ike dollar contained 40 percent silver, tens of millions more general circulation coins were made of nothing but copper and nickel. Because of this new supply of non-silver dollars, the practice of minting tokens for the casinos ceased. When the Eisenhower dollar was removed from circulation in 1978, casinos were given the green light to get back into the token business, which they did enthusiastically in 1979, so much so that the tokens from that year remain plentiful for collectors. Close cousins of casino tokens are casino, or poker, chips, which are used at card tables exclusively. Two of the rarest casino chips were produced for the Golden Goose and the Lucky Casino, both located on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. The Lucky Casino took money from gamblers between 1963 and 1967—only two of its $5 chips have been accounted for. The Golden Goose was in business barely a year longer, from 1975 to 1980, but the reason why a Golden Goose casino chip is so rare is because the Goose's one and only blackjack table took bets for just over a year of that period—only one Golden...
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