Station House Casino Tonopah Nv

State: Nevada
City: Tonopah
Casino: Tonopah Station
Today's chip of the day comes from the Tonopah Station Casino in Tonopah, NV. This is the successor to the Station House Casino, which was discussed previously.
Tonopah Station opened in April, 2002. The sole owner is James Marsh, a Las Vegas car dealer, who also owns the Banc Club in Tonopah, the Longstreet Inn in Amargosa Valley, and the Skyline Casino in Henderson. Marsh has been the owner since the casino's opening; I found an article from 2001 that referred to the Station House's 'new owner' so presumably he bought it then and changed the name. Interestingly, the casino looks like it might have moved at some point. The Station House was located at 1100 Erie St, and NGC records still show that as the doing-business-at address for the registered owner, Tonopah Station House Inc. However, it now appears that their address is 1137 Erie (strangely, their website shows no address at all). I don't know if Tonopah may have done some street renumbering, but typically that wouldn't change whether a location was on the odd or even numbered side of the street.
Tonopah Station's hotel is fairly small - about 75 rooms. At some point in the past, it was branded as a Ramada Inn, but that no longer appears to be the case. The casino, at the time it opened, contained 90 slot machines and 2 blackjack tables. The casino no longer has table games; I'm not sure when they were removed, but it was some time before 2008. I probably would have visited around 2003, when I passed through many of the small towns of central and northern Nevada.
Tonopah Station does not appear to have ever had any $1 chips, so I have a $5 one. The chip is a red Paulson RHC with a white inlay. The front contains an image of a burro, while the back has the image of a man in a bowler hat. I don't know who he is, but he appears on all of their rack chips. The chip has 3 long inserts, in yellow, pink, and gold.

State: Nevada
City: Hawthorne
Casino: El Capitan
Today's chip of the day comes from the El Capitan Casino in Hawthorne, NV. Hawthorne is a small town of about 3,200 people along US 95 in west-central Nevada. Following US 95, Hawthorne is about halfway between Tonopah and Fallon; as the crow flies, it's about halfway between Tonopah and Carson City. Basically, it's really in the middle of nowhere. Hawthorne is the seat of Mineral County, and accounts for about two-thirds of the county's population. Doing the math, this means that Mineral County has a population density of approximately 0.8 people per square mile.
Several sources mention El Capitan opening in 1952, but some histories of the place indicate that it was originally built in the 1940s, after a previous bar with the same name burned down. A Barney O'Malia built up El Capitan to be the most successful casino in Hawthorne, but when his financial backers saw how successful it was, they demanded more control, and then apparently ran the place into the ground. O'Malia, still listed as an owner on the gaming license, bought the place back in the 1960s.
Today, El Capitan is part of the Northern Star Casinos group, which also includes Bourbon Square in Sparks, Scoreboard in Spring Creek, Model T in Winnemucca, and Stockmen's and Commercial Casinos in Elko. NGC records list the owner as El Capitan Lodge Casino, LLC, which it itself a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nevada Casino Holdings, LLC. They appear to have taken ownership in 2010, which roughly coincides with El Capitan dropping its table games. The casino currently has about 200 slot machines, and as El Capitan is the only non-restricted casino in Mineral County, that means that this is 3,800 square miles of Nevada without a single table game.
Unusual for a Nevada casino, the $1 chips are not blue or white. Actually, most of their chips seem to break with tradition ($5 are blue or green, $25 are beige). This chip is a brown ochre Paulson H&C (SCV with a curved hat rim) and a gold hot-stamped center. The inserts are supposed to be orange and black, but my scanner keeps distorting oranges and reds for some reason.

State: Nevada
City: Gardnerville
Casino: Sharkey's
Today's chip of the day comes from Sharkey's [Nugget] Casino in Gardnerville, NV. I put 'Nugget' in brackets, because even though some sources, including the casino's own website and NGC records, use the name 'Sharkey's Nugget' the word Nugget does not appear on their chips or on photos of the casino building. Gardnerville is a town with a population of about 5,600 along US 395 about 10-12 miles south of Carson City.
The building that Sharkey's occupies dates back to 1890, when it was a corner saloon. The first incarnation as a casino seems to have started in 1945, when it was known as the Golden Bubble. A local in the gaming industry, Milos 'Sharkey' Bergovich, purchased the casino and renamed it in 1970. Facing an illness, Bergovich sold the casino in 2001 to Harold Holder of the Holder Hospitality Group. The Holder Group was the owner of several casinos that now make up Northern Star Casinos, including El Capitan, Commercial, Stockmen's, Scoreboard, and Model T. A 2009 bankruptcy filing, due to the economic recession, forced the sale of the casinos. After that, Holder seems to have only held on to Sharkey's and a small casino in Winnemucca called Sundance.
At the time of the sale to Holder, the casino included about 170 slot machines and 2 blackjack tables. After that, I'm not sure when the table games were removed, but I would have visited in 2003 or so. The tables were definitely gone by 2008, when I have a more complete set of NGC licensing records. As I was only able to get a $5 chip, I made a few additional visits to the casino over the years to check up on whether they had brought back their tables. On a visit around 2010, there was a small alcove in the middle of the casino in which there were the pieces of a blackjack table and a sign indicating that the game was coming soon; however, on another visit 6-9 months later, the alcove was populated with a few slot machines. I see no indication that they were licensed for tables during that time period.
Unfortunately, Sharkey's closed for good in November, 2014, apparently as part of a second bankruptcy proceeding. According to an article in the Reno Gazette-Journal, a sign on the door indicates that the closure is only temporary. As this was one of the only non-restricted casinos in Douglas County, outside of the Lake Tahoe area, it would seem likely there's enough of a market to re-open the casino.
The chip is a Chipco product in red, with a white center. There is a rainbow-colored pyramid in the center, and four sets of inserts along the edge, in blue surrounded by white. In previous years, under Bergovich, Sharkey's did have real $1 chips, which were green, strangely enough.

A point of trivia:
It seems that the number 7 is so associated with gambling that '777' is a popular theme. For example, as I type this, the ad at the bottom of the page shows a $777 sign up bonus for ClubUSA. Another example is that many casinos (particularly in the Caesars chain, it seems) have their official address as 777 on some street name, with that street really being the casino driveway.
With that 777 theme in mind, I thought I would point out that the Sharkey's chip that ChipmanSpiff posted above is the 777th chip posted as the Casino Chip of the Day in this thread. That assumes that I haven't lost count along the way. If you are interested in such stuff, I am now trying to keep the up-to-date count as a part of post #1.

State: Nevada
City: Yerington
Casino: Pioneer Crossing
Today's chip of the day is from the Pioneer Crossing Casino in Yerington, NV. This is the successor to Casino West, which was discussed here.
This is the third of the Pioneer Crossing Casino locations, owned by two Mikes (Benjamin and Melarkey). The Dayton location is slots-only. The Fernley location had poker tables for a brief time in 2007 but today is also slots-only. I was not aware of that until after their tables were removed, so I do not have a chip from there. The two Mikes acquired the former Casino West in October 2013 and set out to bring up the casino to a standard 'they feel Yerington deserves.' Pioneer Crossing in Yerington seemed like a decent enough place - I don't remember the old Casino West all that well (I was last there in probably 2003), but the casino looks a bit refreshed. They had two blackjack tables and one poker table, and something like 150 slots.
I visited Pioneer Crossing in early 2014, as I made a lengthy loop from South Lake Tahoe through Gardnerville, Yerington, Fallon, Fernley, and on to Reno, and picked up a handful of chips in the process. I also checked in on some places that didn't work out - Sharkey's still didn't have tables, Pioneer Crossing Fernley had removed theirs, Dini's in Yerington also didn't have any, but I think I finally managed to find the blackjack table at Cactus Jack's in Carson City open, though I had to return later in the day as they only use it on Friday nights. I also stopped in at the Carson Nugget, though I didn't pick up a chip, because I couldn't decide if the place had actually changed its name from 'Carson City Nugget' or not. And sadly, the Ormsby House is taking its sweet time on their renovation.
The chip is a white Paulson RHC with a light blue inlay, featuring the image of a wagon wheel. The chip has two long inserts, in blue and orange, though you wouldn't know it from the photo because my scanner diluted it again.

It sounds a bit as if your loop trip in early 2014 was very much like the one I made just a few months earlier in September 2013. On that day, I headed out of Lake Tahoe and collected souvenir chips from Topaz Lodge, Casino West, Fallon Nugget, Fernley Nugget, and Carson Station. I also posted here a note to rdw4potus suggesting that he get back to Yerington because Casino West was going to change names to Pioneer Crossing. Don't know that I will ever get back that way to collect a chip like yours.
Edit (10/6/17): Well, I did finally make it back to Yerington, and I did pick up a souvenir chip from the Pioneer Crossing casino. Recently, a lot of broken links have appeared in this thread, because Photobucket started charging monthly fees to host images for use on other sites. I don't know whether that will ever change, and it is either expensive or complicated for our users to resolve the broken links. The image that Chipman posted of his Pioneer Crossing chip is now showing up as one of these broken links, so I have posted images of my new souvenir here. I don't know whether his chip was the same. Even if it was, I can at least make a new contribution by showing what it looks like under UV light, with just the orange edge insert fluorescing. Unfortunately, I took these two photos of opposite sides of the chip, so the center inlay does not align with the edge inserts in the same manner in the two images.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication - Leonardo da Vinci