The Normandy Club, which was previously Al's Normandy Club, was a historic bar/card room taken over by Len Miller in the early 80's.
A successful Track coach from Arizona and avid poker player he had always wanted to run a cardroom and jumped at the chance of running the Normandy Club in Oceanside CA. Fresh in the job he ordered some very striking Paulson chips with a real nice flow and color spectrum to them.
But soon after taking over at the Normandy he was presented another opportunity. To go into business with Doyle Brunson and Chip Reese in another cardroom venture that would be located at an old Oceanside steakhouse ...The Oceanside Card Club. There is some speculation that the Normandy Club chips were used temporarily at the OCC site until new chips could be ordered and put into play. If one looks at the chips from the new Oceanside Card Club you can see they are almost a direct match for the chips from the Normandy Club when Len had it...but with obviously more denominations since it was a much bigger room with more games.
The curious thing is that the Normandy Club has a well-known and collected solid red 25 cent chip. I for one had never seen a spotted 25 center and like many entries into Chipguide I was guessing someone was confused as they had one listed with spots but no picture.
(Image from Chipguide)
It's very rare for there to be different designs for the same fractional chip and when there is one it's usually a bad submitted scan or a TRK color that had a different hue from a newer run. The gray El Condor 25 Cent chip comes to mind.
But when I received the following scan from a CA collector friend of mine I was pretty surprised. A Normandy Club 25 center with spots!
Pretty cool. So yes now all of our sample sets are missing another denom varitation...and a cool one at that. Now the mystery is...could there be a Normandy $100 hiding somewhere?
E
A successful Track coach from Arizona and avid poker player he had always wanted to run a cardroom and jumped at the chance of running the Normandy Club in Oceanside CA. Fresh in the job he ordered some very striking Paulson chips with a real nice flow and color spectrum to them.
But soon after taking over at the Normandy he was presented another opportunity. To go into business with Doyle Brunson and Chip Reese in another cardroom venture that would be located at an old Oceanside steakhouse ...The Oceanside Card Club. There is some speculation that the Normandy Club chips were used temporarily at the OCC site until new chips could be ordered and put into play. If one looks at the chips from the new Oceanside Card Club you can see they are almost a direct match for the chips from the Normandy Club when Len had it...but with obviously more denominations since it was a much bigger room with more games.
The curious thing is that the Normandy Club has a well-known and collected solid red 25 cent chip. I for one had never seen a spotted 25 center and like many entries into Chipguide I was guessing someone was confused as they had one listed with spots but no picture.
(Image from Chipguide)
It's very rare for there to be different designs for the same fractional chip and when there is one it's usually a bad submitted scan or a TRK color that had a different hue from a newer run. The gray El Condor 25 Cent chip comes to mind.
But when I received the following scan from a CA collector friend of mine I was pretty surprised. A Normandy Club 25 center with spots!
Pretty cool. So yes now all of our sample sets are missing another denom varitation...and a cool one at that. Now the mystery is...could there be a Normandy $100 hiding somewhere?
E
