Value of The Poker Chip Co - Casino Style 1003 (2 Viewers)

[Mysticum]

When I bought my current set of poker chips, I was a student and on a tighter budget than now, though I still wanted to spend some money on good poker chips without a metal insert. Since Paulson and the likes were too expensive for my wallet, I settled on what I considered to be a reasonable priced "clay chip" without a metal core.

They were called "Casino Style 1003" and sold by The Poker Chip Co. Ltd. They really had two different style of poker chips, this one and another one with dice edge instead of the crowns. They also offered customization with hot stamps on both variants.

You can see the set in the pictures, but in addition to the 300 poker chips shown in the picture, I also have an additional 100 white and 100 green ones, adding up to a total of 500 chips. (The breakdown is 100 white, 150 red, 175 green, 50 purple, 25 yellow.)

When purchased 2005, they cost me $285. Tax, customs, VAT, handling fees etc (from US to Sweden) adds about 50% to that price (so .

Since I'm looking to upgrade my poker chips, I offered a friend to purchase them for 1500 SEK (around $170), and I also included a brand new set of Copaq playing cards (2 decks).

Was that a reasonable price or did I undersell/oversell it? In the end, I paid about $420 for them.

Also, does anyone know more about these chips and the material?

My problem is I probably need to spend far more to get better chips, but more on that soon

 

[allforcharity]

Are these RT Plastics?

You probably overpaid a bit in 2005, but that's chipping life sometimes.

 

[Mysticum]

Are these RT Plastics?

What does RT Plastic mean? If you are asking about the material, I don't know much more than I wrote, other than that it was described as "real clay chips" or something similar. It was pretty clear it was not on par with the top notch chips, but they feel and sound very nice, not far from the real deal. And they stack fantastic as well.

 

[allforcharity]

RT Plastics is a manufacturer. I mentioned it only because they use the dotted white pattern on the inner ring of the chip. If you have a small scale, you can let us know how much the chips weigh.

 

[Mysticum]

I don't really know, but looking at pictures for other RT Plastic chips, they really don't look anything like it tbh.

I weighted the chips, but the scale is not super precise. It's around 10.7g.

 

[gmunny]

The Poker Chip company was based out of Torrance CA and sold retail poker chip sets. The notes I have was RT Plastics did produce the chips for the Poker Chip Company when they were located in Venice CA. RT was sold and moved to Vegas sometime later. I think RT plastics discontinued those poker chips after they were sold/moved.

 

[gmunny]

As far as value, i think $170 is kind of high for what they are and what is available now, though not sure how the pricing works in Sweden.

 

[Mysticum]

I'm just guessing here, but I would be very surprised if they were RT Plastics. I have looked at alla pictures I could find for RT Plastics chips and mine look nothing like them. RT Plastics seems to always have an outer ring of either plastic or rubber material.

My chips doesn't have that at all and are "clayish" all the way through.

 

[Mysticum]

I don't think we're thinking about the same company. This one is called "The Poker Chip Co. Ltd." and there seems to have been other companies as well named "The Poker Chip company". This one I'm talking about was not based in CA at all, but WA.

I also remember that there was a site that had ratings for pretty much all poker chips that existed online, and these were the highest rated after the "real clay" chips.

 

[Eriks]

I think we need a little @BGinGA to help settle this.

 

[allforcharity]

If you like these chips, you don't need our permission to like them. Just use and enjoy!

 

[CrazyEddie]

Also, does anyone know more about these chips and the material?

I'm not sure about the chips - they do somewhat resemble some chips made by Langworthy / RT Plastics (the two companies are related) in their style, but I haven't seen any RT Plastics chips with molded crowns like that.

As for the material - speaking veeerrry broadly, there's three kinds of chips: clay, ceramic, and plastic. All of them are actually made out of plastic, but the type of plastic each uses is rather different. Clay chips are compression molded, and others are injection molded; the type of molding process used plays a big role in the type of plastic used. The chips you've shown are undoubtedly injection molded, which means the plastic they're made out of will be very different from the plastic that clay chips are made out of.

Unfortunately, that's about the best that we can do to describe the material. The specifics of what goes into each chip's composition are trade secrets. And there's a great deal of variation between different company's materials; Paulson, BCC, CPP, and TR King are all "clay" chips, but they're all made of slightly different plastics and feel noticeably different from each other. The same is true for the non-clay chips such as yours - they're all made of slightly different plastics and they all feel different from each other.

---

I dug a little deeper and think I can make a reasonable guess about the lineage of your chips.

Someone else also purchased these same chips in 2003 or thereabouts, according to this reddit post from 2013. They bought them from The Poker Chip Company, whose website is https://www.thepokerchipcompany.com/casino-style-chips.html . The company appears to be defunct now, and the website is a generic SEO keyword spamming garbage site. However, if you browse their old site using the Wayback Machine, you can see that as of 2013 they were still selling poker chips:

The Poker Chip Company is dedicated to the Poker Player by providing Top-of-the-Line poker chips. In business for more than 20 years our Poker Chips-Casino Style have attractive designs and are respected worldwide. Specialized in customizing poker chips to individual ideas or requirements -may it be for a gift or special occasion, weddings, weekly friendly poker games or for the serious player, we do it all. Major corporations like McDonald, AT&T, KFC,BAYER, JAGUAR, to name just a few, are using our chips for promotional and marketing purposes. We also provide card rooms and casinos with “No Cash Value” poker chips for their tournaments. We will be happy to help you out with any questions in regards to customizing the poker chips.

If you look at their "Casino Style Chips" page you'll see this image:

The top row are "Dragon" mold chips. These are lightweight plastic chips manufactured by RT Plastics. The second row are Super Diamonds, lightweight plastic chips made by a wide variety of manufacturers. The third row have a distinctive design that was used by RT Plastics, although you can also sometimes find similar-looking chips made by various generic manufacturers.

The fourth row are your chips, and the fifth row are the others you mentioned.

My guess is that the 1003 and 1006 were also made by RT Plastics. RT Plastics chips were in fact used by card rooms and casinos, just as the front page of the Poker Chip Company website claimed. So perhaps if this site was using RT Plastics chips to make custom chips for both commercial and home users, then maybe they sourced all of their chips from RT Plastics, including 1003 and 1006.

Here's a PCF post from @mike32 showing the very same chips you have, bought from the very same source. The rest of the thread is an attempt to ID some other chips similar to yours, and again, the best consensus is that they seem similar to RT Plastics / Langworthy chips but are otherwise somewhat of a mystery.

Also, using the Wayback Machine, you can see that in 2003 The Poker Chip Company was doing business as "The Poker Chip Company Ltd." located at 2908 Oregon Court, Unit I-11, Torrance, CA but by 2013 they had dropped the "Ltd" and had relocated to 16719 Gramercy Place Gardena, CA.

Hope this piques your interest. We've got some information about your chips, but not a lot. Maybe you can track things down further. If so, please let us all know!

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edit: actually linked to the post from @mike32

 

[gmunny]

Nice post Eddie and yes that's the website. I think I actually saved some of the website pages awhile back when i was looking for better poker chips but cant find them at the moment. This was pre-CT days. The location was in Torrance as I remember debating whether to drive down their office, which was about an hour from my house. The 1003 and 1006 were supposedly clay, but I don't think i have a sample. As far as RT plastics, RT plastics made chips for Poker Chip Co, Huxley and Bud Jones (just the plastic parts, not the coin inlay). AFAIK after RT was purchased by Joe Fabrizio, they never sold those poker chips on their website or through Gambler's General Store. I just assumed they were discontinued .

Here are few samples that i have:

 

[ChipEnvy]

Bought from The Poker Chip Co. in 2001. Settled on these because they were like $.15 cheaper than TRK's at the time. I still shake my head at that decision... Don't get me wrong though, I love these chips and am very defensive of them being called dice chips. Like has been said, they are injection molded with no metal insert which makes a world of difference.

Varsity Poker Stacked

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My buddies in college started a weekly game in '95, it became so popular that we had to limit...

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My first set of chips. These are injection molded, so don't confuse them with Dice chips! 800...

 

[allforcharity]

So my original guess was probably right. I was thinking about Langworthy but I didn't realize there was a connection to RT.

 

[mike32]

I bought a set in early 2000’s and it was a mistake but I didn’t know any better. But my kid uses them now so it’s all good. Mine are a mix of the super diamond and the ones with crowns. As far as value my guess is 10-15 cents each?

 

[mike32]

Also in my opinion with style 1003 the green, blue and black are all way too similar!

 

[Mysticum]

@CrazyEddie WOW! That's amazing information! And yes, it's correct, I even recognize the homepage, and it was, as I said, described as Casino Style 1003.

Also thanks for the clarification about injection molded. It seems no doubt about the fact that they are injection molded. Very nice ones, though, and the sound and feeling are very good imho, by far the best of all my chips except Paulson and BCC.