It was back in the summer of 2000 that the ill-fated London Club debuted within the doomed Aladdin Hotel & Casino, a remake on the site of the original Aladdin that has since morphed into Planet Hollywood.
The first Las Vegas "casino within a casino," the London Club was a 35,000-square-foot independent entity run by operators out of the U.K. Designed to appeal exclusively to high rollers, the space featured a 15,000-square-foot casino offering 30 high-limit table games ( including baccarat, single-zero roulette and blackjack), 100 high-denomination slot machines, a private lobby and dedicated elevator service, a 120-seat five-star restaurant, and smaller gaming rooms designed to recall the "salle privées" found in Europe's most exclusive casinos. The dealers were dressed in elegant evening attire and the same was expected of guests.
In true Vegas style, one of the marketing ploys hit upon to promote the facility was the introduction of super-high denomination chips or "plaques," as they are more correctly known, issued in values of $100,000, $500,000, $1 million, and $5 million, with one lone $10 million "super-plaque." In contrast to the typically round casino chip, plaques are rectangular in shape, like a playing card, and the London Club's were appropriately over-sized. The $10 million version, which did its job of attracting international publicity, was black, white, and gold in color, measured 7 inches long by 4 inches wide, and was inscribed with the words "London Club" and "$10 million" in gold leaf.
The whole London Club experiment turned out to be a fiasco, not least because of the problems that beset the Aladdin from the outset, and it wasn't long before London Clubs International, which intended to be just a minor stakeholder in the whole project, found itself having to bail out its senior partner, increasing its share from 25 to 40 percent in the first year of operations. Things went only from bad to worse and would cost the chairman of London Clubs his job (and his health). By the following summer the whole experiment was over, with the bankrupt Aladdin being sold to a partnership of Planet Hollywood and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide.
So, what happened to those plaques? As is the norm with any casino closure, the impending shuttering of the London Club would have been posted in the local press and elsewhere, giving any individual who had one of these plaques in their possession the opportunity to redeem it, usually within a 30-day window. Once the redemption window has expired, all chips in the possession of the casino are usually destroyed, leaving only those that have found their way into the hands of collectors, or of guests who are still holding them thanks to sentimentality or absent-mindedness.
Those "novelty" plaques, which were nevertheless real and approved by Gaming Control, were unlikely to meet the fate of the average obsolete chip, so we jumped on the message boards of the Casino Chip & Gaming Token Collectors Club, a source that has never let us down to the best of our recollection. It took a few days, but true-to-form the responses came back, with one member revealing that he had a full set of London Club chips and plaques -- but only up to the $100,000 level. Another expert was able, from memory, to shed some more light on how it all went down. We quote: "The plaques were routed on the backs to cancel them. About 15 complete sets, including one with the 10M [plaque] were framed for execs (only one 10M was made). Maybe 3 to 5 [sets] had the 5M plaque. Supposedly, the rest were destroyed. But anything is possible... The sets sat in the framer's closet for more than a year before he was told what to do with them! The framed sets were a beautiful job."
If anyone else out there happens to own a set, or has seen them in a private collection or elsewhere, do drop us a line with any additional insights and we'll post them as an "Update." If that 10M ever shows up on the open market, we wonder what it will fetch, but we're guessing it will be one of those rare exceptions, when it comes to casino chips, whereby the obsolete collectible will not be worth as much, or more, than its face value anytime soon.
