I found inside a very old attaché case a poker card/poker chip set circa 1900. It is self-contained in a small carrying case. The cards are very early Bicycle cards and the chips are miniature and fit into a chip holder that slides into a slot below the cards. As far as I can tell it is one-of-a-kind in that I cannot find anything like it anywhere on the Web.

It is really slick. I can picture an old riverboat gambler carrying this or possibly a soldier in WWI.

Anyone ever seen one of these or know of anyone who might have one? I'd like to know what its worth. It is a real piece of poker history

Dan Colmerauer

You know, pictures would be AWESOME.

I have pics but don't know how to post them.

I would love to see these pictures. I'm also intrigued by the six year old account with six posts, two of which are in this thread.

Try uploading the pictures to a hosting site like imgur.com (it's free). Then you can embed the images in a post here. If you can PM, send me a message and I'll try to help.

If watching Pawn Stars has taught me anything, it's that these "gamblers kits" were fairly common.

Here's an thread at Chiptalk regarding the "gambler's kit" Pawn Stars episode.
http://www.chiptalk.net/forum/poker-...bling-kit.html

Google has many images, like this one:

FYI, the Pawn Stars episode about this ("Ace in the Hole" from 2010) is not available on the History Channel site.

Pics are posted here:

http://www.cardschat.com/f13/vintage...0/#post2454611

You might have to scroll up or down a little but you can't miss them.

Dan

You cannot see these pictures unless you are a registered member of that site.

For pics please email me at: (snip) and I'll email some to you.

Dan

EDIT: I removed Dan's email to keep him from getting scraped and spammed. I'll contact him and get the pics posted.

Here are the pics I got from Dan. While it sounds like this kind of kit may have been somewhat common back then, it is certainly an interesting look back.

That is pretty cool. I can see a card sharp pulling this out during a trans-atlantic voyage.

I can't see the chips but that sort of set is fairly common. when I was atcively collecting chips I frequently came across this sort of thing. Not sure how you dated this. You might be able to date the cards with some references but you can't really tell that the cards came with the chips or that the chips and cards came with the case. These can easily be mixed and matched.

One of my favorite stories came from a fellow collector who was at a flea market. He kept asking everyone if they had any old poker chips. And finally one woman told him she ha d an 19th century set of poker chips. He asked if he could see them and she went and pulled out a set of very common clay chips with a relief image of the Spirit of Saint Louis on them.

So he asked her why she thought these were from the 19th century and she told some story about being passed down in her family and being able to trace them to the early 19th century.

So he told her she was mistaken and she got very upset with him........ How could he know better than her family .....

Well for one thing there is a picture of an airplane on the chips .... specifically an airplane from 1927.

lolhistoryfail

At first I thought maybe she was confused, thinking 19th century meant 1900s, but she's a dealer at flea market. How can she not know that?