So, last night was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Those fucking Bourbon $5s.
Never have I come across a collecting community where there is more unnecessary drama and saltiness, and before I permanently pull back to primarily chipping on PCF through PMs and occasional classifieds, I am making one more post to this thread to lay out the skullduggery that led us here. I wanted to document this to show exactly how petty and frankly, deceptive, people are on here. I do this without malice, and will use screenshots to tell the story.
But first, like the movies -- the straw. Then, the story in flashback.
The Straw
Last night, while browsing PCF classifieds and posts before bed as I am (and I suppose many of us) are wont to do, I saw these two notifications.
The "angry face" post in question, was this one -- my
Pr0n post of my Bourbon Street limit set.
This confused me, since Eric and I have always had a cordial relationship, and have never really had any bad dealings. I sold him some Binion's chips at cost a few months ago, and we have occasionally PM'ed. So, I hoped it was a misclick, especially because this was an older post. But, to be sure, I sent him a PM.
To which, I got this one word response.
Now, the flashback. (Because I don't think anyone has the right story.)
On Monday, December 14th, one of my best friends on PCF reached out to me to ask if I was interested in owning a set of Bourbon Street chips. Other than
@ReallyGoodUsername, I didn't even know of anyone who had them on PCF, and the only off-PCF source I knew of had a bunch of racks of $5s, but the price point was high, and I hadn't pulled the trigger on them yet. I had been considering building a limit set, and with the addition of the $5s and $100s from the set my friend was telling me about, this off-forum source for the chips became more attractive, because I'd have a quorum of the $5 chips necessary for the limit set.
So, I told my friend I was interested, and I was connected to
@AfterTheFact, and David was a perfect gentleman to deal with. We made a deal, I paid the same day, and even paid to have them overnighted to me. I simultaneously pulled the trigger on the additional 9 expensive racks from off-forum, and I made a trade deal for 2 more racks with
@bluegill. The idea was to get to 2 racks of $5s per player for an 8 player table, but I was one rack short.
For my records, because of both the price of the off-forum source, my cost of what I traded to
@bluegill, and my purchase price with David, I calculated my average cost of each $5 chip to be $17, or $1700 a rack. I was fine with this, since I didn't plan to let any go, and wanted to add one more rack from somewhere.
On December 16, I made
this Pr0n post of the set I bought from
@AfterTheFact. I pay attention to some of the negative reactions to my posts, especially if they're from people I consider PCF friends or acquaintances, because I try to be aware of how I might be making someone feel. I saw two sad faces -- one from someone I knew, one from someone I didn't.
I didn't know who
@MilouPilou1 was, but I considered Brie a PCF friend, so I texted her, and got a troubling response.
I asked
@FordPickup92 who it was, so I could reach out and offer him an ROFR, and thought it might be
@MilouPilou1, but given his PCF join date, I didn't think it could be him -- "
he had a deal with someone else overseas for 2 years".
Eventually, after some digging, Brie confirmed it was indeed
@MilouPilou1 she had heard about. I decided to reach out to him directly.
I immediately reached out to
@MilouPilou1 and got a speedy response.
And he followed up with this clarification.
And, as I had mentioned to
@FordPickup92, I offered him an ROFR.
Satisfied that I had done what I could, I set about completing my limit set build with the additional 9 off-forum racks, and then completing the trade with
@bluegill.
Once I had accumulated the 15 racks of $5s, and was looking for the 16th, my mind kept going back to the fact that there was a chipper looking hard for a rack of the $5s, and while it was nice to have 2 racks per player for an 8-player table, my chipping karma would be better off if I offered the odd 15th rack to
@MilouPilou1. I was trepidatious about offering it, because I knew my average cost on the $5s was bonkers from a sales standpoint, but I hadn't bought them to sell them, they were keepers for me. But, I figured I would offer it anyway. This happened 5 days after our first exchange when I made the ROFR gesture.
I responded thusly.
Trying to save screenshots so I don't hit the image limit, but I responded with this:
Then, of course, a whole of hell broke loose after
@MilouPilou1 posted this on his WTB thread, after my offer.
@horseshoez, for example, decided to take personal (passive-aggressive) umbrage to my paying what I wanted for chips that I wanted to own. Which really should be no-one's business. I wasn't trying to sell them for that price, I just offered an extra rack I had to someone who wanted it, at my (albeit high) cost.
At this point, I believed had done everything I could (except donate $300 to a Frenchman I did not know.) As I started studying more limit sets on PCF, I thought that it might be prudent, for how my friends tend to play, to have 3 racks of the workhorse chip per player, so I set about trying to see if I could find an additional 9 racks. I came close, but not all the way --
I was able to find an additional 4 racks from my off-PCF source, and an additional 2 racks from a PCFer. My average price on the $5s dropped a tiny bit, to $1670/rack.
In January, unable to find any more, I settled on 20 racks of $5s as my set and traded the odd 21st rack to a close PCF friend for a rack of Blaze Orange chips.
Which leads me to
@HaRDHouSeiNC's inexplicable reaction to the old Pr0n post at 12:41AM Pacific time this morning.
And then I remembered that
@MilouPilou1 had sent me a very weird out-of-context message around a half-hour before that. Behold:
It felt like a bizarre notion that he would have any resentment to me at all, since I was just offering some chips to him after having learned that he had been looking for them. So, I replied thusly:
It is shortly after that Eric and I had that short exchange. My theory? Well, I have one, but its moot. I'll let you form your own opinions on all this.
What I have decided is that it is best to now remain in the lurker shadows as so many PCFers who have large collections do. I was advised early on (unheeded, of course) to stay quiet, stick to those whom I know, and do business under cover of PMs. Last time, when I thought I might take a break from posting, it was because I felt like it might be best for the community. Now, I'm doing it because I believe its what is best for me.
What I'm realizing is that this isn't a community at all, its a loose group of various factions, and I don't belong to any of them.
My chips, henceforth, will be for me and my close friends to see / play with and ogle at.
That's all, folks.
