Every casino has its superstitions. Lucky seats, unlucky dealers, cards that should never be played, and players who refuse to touch their chips with their left hand.
But there is an old story from a small Nevada casino about a poker chip that nobody wanted to keep and not because it was particularly valuable. Oh, and not because it was counterfeit.
Nobody wanted it because every time it appeared in a pot, somebody was going to have a very bad night.
And because, no matter what the casino staff did with it, the chip always came back.

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A chip nobody remembered buying

The story begins in 2007, at a small establishment allegedly called the ███████ casino.
It was just after two in the morning when a dealer noticed an unfamiliar green $5 chip among the winnings of a regular player. Its design was old-fashioned, with a faded emblem and three tiny white marks along one edge. Nobody thought much of it, casinos occasionally find obsolete chips mixed into circulation, especially in places that have changed ownership over the years. The dealer handed it to the floor supervisor, who set it aside to be checked in the morning.

Later that night, the player who had lost the pot reportedly suffered a bizarre accident at his hotel: the metal front panel of an ice machine came loose as he was using it, crushing two fingers on his right hand. An unfortunate event, something that can happen to everyone right?

Until the chip appeared again. Two evenings later, another dealer discovered the same green chip in a pot awarded at a different table. The player who lost that hand was involved in an elevator malfunction less than three hours later: the elevator stopped slightly above its landing, and the man fractured his ankle trying to step out.

The casino staff began joking about the unlucky chip, but then a third incident occurred: a player who had lost a substantial pot was struck by an automatic parking barrier that descended unexpectedly as he walked underneath it. He escaped with bruises and a mild concussion but still: three pots. Three losing players. Three accidents before sunrise.
The joke stopped being funny.

The strange arithmetic of Bad Luck

According to the legend, the ███████'s surveillance department began keeping an unofficial record.
Over the following weeks, the mysterious chip appeared in eleven separate pots. Each time, the player who lost the hand experienced an unusual accident before the night was over.
A falling shelf. A malfunctioning revolving door. A taxi windshield shattered by an object nobody could identify.

Some incidents resulted in minor injuries, others were simply terrifying near misses, but notably none were fatal.
That last detail would later become one of the strangest aspects of the story: accidents seemed almost carefully calibrated, serious enough to be remembered, but never quite serious enough to kill.
What made the incidents particularly unsettling was that the chip didn't belong to the unlucky player. It always appeared among the winnings of whoever took the pot. It was always the loser who suffered.

At first, management suspected a practical joke. Perhaps someone was introducing the chip into games deliberately, then engineering accidents to create a local legend? But two details made that explanation increasingly difficult to accept.

First, nobody could establish where the chip came from. It resembled an old ███████ issue, but its particular design was absent from the casino's inventory records.
Second, and the thing that made people seriously concerned about it, the chip could not be removed from circulation.
The cashier's cage reportedly sealed it inside a numbered evidence bag and locked it in a secure drawer. Three nights later, the same chip appeared in another pot.
The bag was still sealed when the drawer was opened, but when checked it was empty.
Management ordered the chip placed in the main casino safe, this time under continuous surveillance. Next evening, a dealer found it at Table Six.
There was no corresponding loss from the safe, no suspicious entry, and no indication of tampering.
They even tried to toss it in the trash, which was then collected in the morning and hauled away by the garbage truck. It was back in the casino and in a pot less than five days later.

By then, the players had developed a peculiar superstition: they were afraid of losing a hand when that particular green chip was in the pot.

Three visitors from Washington

The story might have remained a strange piece of casino folklore if three federal investigators hadn't arrived one Thursday morning. Two men and a woman presented credentials identifying them as representatives of the United States Department of the Treasury.
They informed the casino director that they were investigating a possible interstate operation involving counterfeit gaming chips and financial fraud; their paperwork appeared legitimate, their credentials were accepted, and the director agreed to cooperate. They were professional, polite, and remarkably well-informed.
According to one employee, the woman leading the investigation asked unusually specific questions:
How many times had the chip appeared?
Had anyone tried to destroy it?
Had any of the losing players experienced similar accidents before visiting the casino?
Most strangely, she wanted to know whether anyone had reported unusual dreams after handling the chip.

The director apparently laughed at that last question, the woman did not.

For nearly two hours, the investigators examined surveillance records, interviewed staff, and compared notes with the casino's incident reports. They appeared to show very little interest in the possibility of ordinary financial fraud and eventually, they requested the chip itself, which was brought to them in a sealed envelope.
One of the men examined it briefly, without removing it from the envelope, and nodded to his colleague. She opened a reinforced black carrying case, considerably larger than necessary for a single casino chip but, before placing the envelope inside, the younger investigator stepped into the corridor to make a telephone call. A security employee passing nearby reportedly overheard part of the conversation;
he remembered the words because they seemed so unnecessarily dramatic for a suspected counterfeit gambling token:
"...probably safe, but we're using a Type III containment case for transport, just as a precaution."

The employee later said that the investigator sounded less like someone discussing a piece of evidence and more like someone arranging the transport of hazardous material.
As it turned out, that wasn't entirely inconsistent with what the investigators told the staff next.

An unusual medical precaution

Before leaving, the woman requested that everyone who had directly assisted with the investigation gather in the director's office; she explained that the chip might have contained traces of a mildly radioactive material, supposedly used in some older industrial manufacturing processes. Under normal circumstances, she said, the material was harmless. However, certain environmental conditions could cause it to become unstable, potentially exposing people who had handled the chip or spent prolonged periods near it.

She assured the employees that the risk was extremely low, nevertheless, federal safety procedures required a precautionary treatment. The investigators distributed small tablets in individually sealed pharmaceutical packaging, each accompanied by a professionally printed information leaflet.
The documentation looked perfectly ordinary: clinical terminology, dosage instructions, a batch number, warnings in small print; there was no familiar commercial brand, but the woman explained that it was a specialized preparation intended to help the body eliminate any potentially harmful residues.
One tablet, taken with water, would be sufficient. The director took his without hesitation and the remaining employees followed. But one of them, a relatively young surveillance technician, would later claim that something rather embarrassing had happened as he raised the tablet to his mouth: the pill slipped between his fingers, brushed against his cheek, and dropped directly into the open breast pocket of his jacket.
He froze for a moment; everyone else had already swallowed theirs, and the investigators were watching the group finish the procedure. Not wanting to look clumsy, he simply took his glass, drank some water, and pretended to swallow; he intended to retrieve the tablet and take it when he got home.
The investigators appeared satisfied, collected the empty packaging and reminded everyone that the investigation was confidential, then thanked the director for his cooperation.
Shortly afterward, the three visitors left the casino. They took the chip, the incident reports, and the original surveillance recordings covering its appearances.

As far as anyone present was concerned, the matter was closed, or so it seemed.

The surveillance technician

Approximately two hours later, the surveillance technician finished his shift. He was still thinking about the strange investigation, particularly the black carrying case and the peculiar conversation he had overheard in the corridor.
He found two colleagues in the staff break room and casually brought up the federal visitors. Neither knew what he was talking about.
At first, he thought they were joking, he mentioned the Treasury credentials, the questions about the chip, and the radioactive material. They stared at him and then at each other, perplexed. One employee suggested that perhaps he had confused the day with some earlier inspection. The other asked what green chip he was talking about.
Increasingly unsettled, the technician sought out the casino director; the director remembered no federal investigators, no medical treatment, and no unusual visitors that morning.
When the technician insisted that they had spent nearly two hours reviewing the incident reports together, the director became visibly confused and dismissed him, asking him to stop wasting his time.
Nobody remembered the investigators. Nobody remembered the tablets.
The technician returned to the break room and reached into his jacket pocket: the white pill was still there.
He had been planning to take it that evening but now, suddenly, swallowing it seemed like a remarkably bad idea.

A pill without a name

On his way home, the technician stopped at a private analytical laboratory. He explained that he had received an unfamiliar medication from people claiming to be federal officials, and that he wanted to know what it contained.
The laboratory staff initially assumed it was an ordinary pharmaceutical identification request, however, a preliminary examination produced an unexpected result: the tablet did not appear to match any marketed medication in their reference database.
The technician was told that a more detailed chemical analysis would be required to establish its composition. One of the laboratory employees advised him to consider filing a police report, particularly if the substance had been distributed without a clear identification or prescription.
They offered to retain the tablet for testing and he agreed. He was asked to return the following morning for the complete results.

When he arrived the next day, the laboratory was open as usual. The same sign hung above the entrance, the same reception counter stood near the door, but the people were different.
Not one of the employees he had spoken to the previous afternoon was present: the receptionist had never heard of him, there was no record of a tablet being submitted for analysis, no pending laboratory report, and no corresponding entry in their system.

The supervisor politely suggested that he might have visited a different laboratory but he knew he hadn't: he could describe the waiting room, the equipment on the counter, even the chipped corner of the receptionist's desk. Everything was exactly where he remembered it, except the people. And the pill.

The photographs that went missing

Back at the casino, the technician began looking for evidence.
The ███████'s surveillance department routinely archived still images of unusual incidents and visits by outside officials, especially when they involved restricted areas. He distinctly remembered saving three photographs of the investigators speaking with the casino director during their visits: in the first, the woman was displaying her credentials, in the second, the director appeared to be signing a document and the third showed one of the men holding the reinforced black case.

He had personally extracted the images from the surveillance cameras but now all three were missing. The filenames remained in the archive, but the photographs themselves could not be opened or recovered.

Some of the older images showing the mysterious green chip were still present, but they proved little beyond the existence of an unusual-looking casino token.
Nothing connected it to the federal visitors.The technician searched the surveillance archives, checked the security logs, and questioned other employees about the green chip in the images: nobody remembered it.

He considered calling the Treasury Department, using the name he thought he remembered from the investigator's credentials. He eventually dediced against it, because at that point he started to question himself and his memory, and in any case he did not want to lose his job over something impossible to prove.


There is, of course, no publicly verifiable evidence that any of these events occurred. The ███████ story survives as one of those peculiar gambling legends passed between casino employees, occasionally embellished and almost certainly distorted over time. Perhaps the entire account was invented, perhaps the technician simply misunderstood what happened or imagined part of it.
Or perhaps there really was an unusual green chip, and somebody eventually found a way to keep it from returning: the green chip stopped appearing at the tables, and even the story of the chip itself vanished from the from the memory of everyone, except of the surveillance technician. Who after a while stopped bringing up the subject to the conversation.