The Cedar Room

Owner: @toad94
Inlay Design:
Year Produced:

When Blue Chip Company announced the TRK dyes would be available for retail orders I started planning the end-all, be-all set for every poker night or casino night I could imagine. I knew I wanted a wide range of denominations and a whole bunch of chips. The result was my BCC Cedar Room set.

The Cedar Room is the "official" name of my basement after a major remodeling that included lining the room with cedar planks. Huntley Lodge is the fake-resort name for my house. So The Cedar Room is essentially the poker room inside the Huntley Lodge resort. (Oooh, pretty exclusive.) The logo on the inlay comes from a design I drew for an art project in high school. It doesn't mean anything other than for sentimental reasons to me.

Several of the color combos pay homage to various casino chips that have special meaning to me. I'll put the full stories below to keep this part brief, but in summary: the $5 is a tribute to the Las Vegas MGM Grand $5, the $25 is a tribute to The Venetian's original rack $25, the $100 is a tribute to The Mirage $100, the $500 uses the same colors as the King's Castle $500 from Lake Tahoe, and the $20,000 is a tribute to Luxor's $20,000 chip.

Here's the long-ish stories about the tribute chips:

$25 Venetian (original rack). On my frist trip to Las Vegas I was playing blackjack at The Venetian. I had about ten $25s in my hand and I was amazed at the weight of this little stack of chips. I didn't know anything about chips at the time other than I was impressed by their heft, the colors, the sound they made, and the feel of stacking and moving these little pieces of art. When I got home from Vegas I immediately started searching for chips like the ones I had seen in Vegas. On ebay I found a small set of Crystal Park chips. I loved those so much I looked into having chips made with my name on them. I found a company called Poker Chips Online and in early 2002 I ordered my first set of ASMs. So all of this (morbid obsession) started with a half-barrel of Venetian $25s.

$5 MGM Grand, Las Veags. On the same trip to Las Vegas in late 2001 my friends and I walked through the MGM Grand and past a craps table that was open but with no players. Not knowing how to play craps I thought this would be a good time to learn, since nobody else was playing. The dealers were quite put out that I interrupted their conversation and tersely ordered me to put chips here, roll these down there, put more chips there, roll again, roll again. I lost. "That's how you play, all right?" Uh-huh. Good lesson on why it's best to not interrupt old-school dealers when they don't already have players at a table. As I walked away with a few remaining $5s I remember thinking about Vegas Vacation and the dealer played by Wallace Shawn (The MGM dealers were Vizzinis), when Clark asks, "What can I do with this?" Well, I kept one as a souvenir. Great looking, simple chip.

$20,000 Luxor. I don't know if the $20K Luxor was ever used in the casino or if it was just a prototype chip but I've stayed at Luxor many times and this chip just honors those memories. It's a nice color combo, too, so I'm glad it worked into the set.

$500 King's Castle. I think King's Castle is one of the best (if not the best) looking racks of casino chips ever. The colors are perfect. The inlay is a masterpiece. Being TRKs is a nice bonus, too. When BCC said they would be producing TRK colors I knew my $500 was going to use the sweeeeet $500 colors from King's Castle. The BCC reproduction colors are not true to TRK colors, but, hey, it's the same dyes and the same punch so I'm happy. As a bonus, years later, I got to stay at the Hyatt Lake Tahoe which used to be King's Castle. Although most of the property has been remodeled and updated the casino remains largely unchanged from its King's Castle days.

$100 Mirage homage. This is the most important one to me. After years of joking about taking my grandma to Las Vegas ("C'mon, Grammy, let's go party in Vegas!" "Mark, hush!"), she finally relented and my father, brother, aunt, and I got the chance to do just that in 2003. We stayed at The Mirage. After playing blackjack for a while I ended up with a handful of color-up chips including an almost minty $100. I didn't cash that in, thinking it might make a nice--if not expensive--souvenir (and I figured if I really needed to I could cash it in on a later trip since at the time--before marriage--I visited Las Vegas more frequently than I do now).

My grandma loved the trip and we talked for the next few years about going back but her health declined and she never made the return trip. When I visited her in the hospital the night she died we joked about getting her strength back and getting out of there so we could go to Vegas. She smiled and said that would be lovely. I'm pretty glad I didn't cash in that hundo because now anytime I see it I think of my Grandma and that great last trip.

Bonus story (thanks for reading!) - On that Vegas trip with my Grandma the five of us (dad, brother, aunt, grandma, and me) would come together for meals or to do some sightseeing but our gamblin' interests differ slightly so we'd tend to go our separate ways during "play time". After the blackjack session that ended with the minty $100 chip I walked over to check on Grammy. (The four of us would regularly keep tabs on how she was doing or if she needed anything.)

This time a crowd of about twenty people had formed around where my Grandma was playing. I saw her standing upright so I wasn't concerned about health issues (thankfully), and I soon realized the crowd was just enjoying watching this five-foot octogenarian playing three slot machines at the same time (she would sway from machine 1 to machine 2, keeping the reels spinning on each; occasionally she'd go over to machine 3 and give it a spin, then tap machine #2 on the way back to #1. On and on she'd go. That was her thing--she loved it).

I walked past the crowd to get close enough to talk to her over the chorus of slot machine sounds and the giggles and well-wishes of the bystanders enjoying her performance. The crowd had formed a semi-circle around these three machines, keeping a polite ten-foot radius away from her. As soon as I encroached on this semi-circle to lean in and talk to her, a very large man with one of those spiral-cord ear-pieces stepped forward from the crowd. Grammy saw this out of the corner of her eye and turned to him, "It's okay, this is my grandson." The very large guy nodded to me and then stepped back into the semi-circle crowd. Holy crap, The Mirage assigned my grandma a bodyguard! Anyway, after a few days of fun and many memories we were surprised to have the casino host introduce himself and inform us that we'd be going to the airport in a Mirage limousine. Way to go, Grandma!