Question of the Day - 04 February 2025

The lifespan of a casino cheque, also known as chip, varies depending on usage, materials, and maintenance. On average, casino chips are designed to last between five to 10 years with proper care. 

Cheques made from high-quality clay composite or ceramic tend to last longer than those made from plastic. Chips used more often in a high-volume casino will wear down more quickly, especially around the edges, and the colors will dull.

Proper cleaning and handling can extend the life of a chip. Chips that are regularly cleaned and handled gently are likely to last longer. You can read our QoD about cleaning chips here. However, like anything run through a cleaning process, that can also wear them down enough over time that they have to be destroyed. 

Casino chips are often replaced when they become old or shabby due to wear and tear, but there are also other reasons why casinos replace them. An important one is a concern over security. Cheques with outdated security features (such as older RFID tags) might be replaced to prevent counterfeiting or fraud. Also, as you allude to in the question, casinos sometimes replace them as part of rebranding efforts, such as changing their logo, color scheme, or overall aesthetic. If a casino undergoes a rebranding, new chips might be issued with a new logo or design to reflect the updated brand identity. And every so often, casinos might introduce new denominations or alter existing ones.

You didn't ask, but when a casino pulls cheques out of circulation to replace them, what do they do with them? Well, they're disposed of in a variety of ways. 

A lot of people take them home after forgetting to cash them in or to keep them as souvenirs. The casinos absolutely love when this happens: Cheques cost the casinos a fraction of their face value to buy, so they make the difference in profit when they're taken out of circulation. 

The Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club has thousands of members who collect casino cheques. In particular, they descend on casinos that are closing or rebranding to buy up chips that are about to expire and could, at some point, be worth more than their face value.

In the more freewheeling days of Las Vegas' past, chips were reported to have wound up as part of the foundations of new casinos under construction. But these days, they have to be accounted for. Gaming Control's "chip-destruction plan" requires submitting two documents when they're discontinued or destroyed for one reason or another.

And when they need to be destroyed? They're sent back to the manufacturers, where they're ground into dust by big machines, then generally wind up as landfill, though some companies manage to recycle some of the materials through their own processes.