Adam Savage here from Testim in my cave with a show-and-tell of a prop and story
now what I've got in front of me here is roughly $100,000 worth of poker chips
fictional poker chips these are actually my replicas of Teddy KGB's poker chips
from the amazing gambling poker movie rounders starring Matt Damon and John
Malkovich and Ed Norton one of my favorite movies arguably responsible for
the early 2000 late 90s early 2000s poker boom alongside an amazing episode
of this American Life and some other New York Times stories that came out I'm
obsessed with rounders and I wanted a set of Teddy KGB's chips ever since I
saw the movie now they're expensive if you want to buy them from the film
production they show up on eBay from time to time for like you know 20 or 30
bucks a piece like her chip well I'm not gonna spend that for a full set so I
carefully looked at screen grabs of the film over a period of time and logged
that there were one two three four five different kinds of chips each with a
different color of chip a different color of Pip and a different number of
pips for instance these $500 chips have six pips around the perimeter where the
hundred dollar chips have four pips I logged all this information and reached
out to a poker chip company and said could you make these chips for me and
they said and I reached out to another one a few weeks later and asked them and
they said no and it started down this long journey of trying to find someone
who could replicate these and then I found this company and I sent them the
the five different kinds of chips I wanted and they said Oh seems like you
want to make the chips from rounders which we built what I couldn't believe
I'd actually found the company now they don't want me to tell their name so I'm
sorry I'm not gonna share their name with you at their request they had made
a promise to the production that they would not make a second run of the poker
chips so we had to include a key difference between my poker chips and
the production poker chips and the difference is the
the bear on my chips is facing in the wrong direction I don't mind that
difference at all I am totally fine that the numbers the right color
it's copperplate it's the same font the bear is the same bear that they used
it's my high resolution breakdown of it from screenshots and I was able to get a
full set of Teddy KGB's chips but that's not the whole story because thieves have
sat in my shop for like seven years while I've tried to figure out what they
could go in what would they be carried in there are all sorts of poker chip
carriers you can buy with a wrinkled this I ordered 1,200 chips most poker
chip carriers carry a thousand chips 1200 is not a common number so I had
trouble finding one then I bought some 600 carriers and I put broke this into
two stacks and put them in those but even those they didn't they weren't that
well made they didn't feel authentic to me it just wasn't right and then it was
watching rounders last week and I was noticing Teddy has the the lockbox area
where he puts out the chips so Matt Damon shows up but they come in
beginning of the movie with $30,000 and says give me three stacks of high
society that's this three trays of hundred-dollar chips 300 of them and
Teddy delivers these out of his lockbox and I thought well okay so he's got an
infrastructure for chips he's had them made for his underground gambling ring
he's got his chips you know sometimes in these gaming lorries they don't have all
their poker games on site what if Teddy had to host a poker game outside of his
illegal gambling Club what would that case look like and that was the thought
experiment that gave me the idea to make the case for my set of Teddy's chips it
starts with this sled now this is a standard kind of poker chip carrier with
a center handle usually in a casino these poker chip carriers are clear as
part of the transparency and ease of understanding that all the poke chips
like every bit of Vegas and casino infrastructure is meant so that you can
check the amounts of what you've got very cleanly like it's very easy to tell
in a to carry like this if you've got a
hundred chips if you had 99 you'd be able to tell immediately just by
touching the ends of the stacks so usually in Vegas the poker chip carriers
are clear what Teddy has an illegal gambling ring so I thought it shouldn't
be clear it should be opaque so this is my Teddy KGB traveling poker game chip
carrier but wait there's more I included a lock so that you could you could lock
it up so that Teddy can carry it around and the lock is actually attached to a
little piece of hardware here so now it's a very secure thing oh but wait
there's even more than that so when we open the lock to get inside and we pull
off that cover inside the cover itself we have hope
a couple decks of cards an extra poker chip one of John wicks gold coins and Oh
some mattress from the snake pit in Blade Runner I decided to do a spread
spectrum homage to all my favorite movies here this is what I imagined
Teddy KGB would transport his chips around in a home game and I'm really
pleased with this construction I'm very ecstatic about it except for
one reason except for one thing is there would be labeling on this and I
don't know I'm really rusty with my Cyrillic which is if I knew Cyril like
it was in a past life but not this one I want to put writing on this that somehow
is canon to the rounders universe so part of what I was thinking and I'm
actually giving this show-and-tell to ask for some advice I picture a large
Cyrillic letter on the front like Teddy might have eight of these right $800,000
chips tax to be able to send out to home games for different Russian oligarchs so
maybe those are delineated by letters rather than numbers I don't know does
that work in Cyrillic do they categorize things by letters as well as numbers
like we do in with with Arabic numbers I don't know but I
thought about a large Cyrillic number here and then something here that didn't
say Teddy KGB but had it kind of like a spray-painted you know you know where
it's from kind of thing and then I thought of like a Russian custom stamp
over here anyway I I've been gathering visual data and reference material for
potential kinds of writing sticker or signage that would go on this but I need
some advice from people who know Russian and specifically like Russian gambling
rinks also by the way I want to make this accurate and look really cool but I
also don't want to make it so accurate that like if I am riding down the street
with my one wheel carrying these poker chips that some Russian mobster it's
gonna get upset because it looks like I stole something right I am NOT putting
on airs here I'm just saying I don't want to make it so accurate it actually
gets me in trouble but the question is what would the signage on Teddy KGB's
chips be that's the next stage for this show and tell thanks for visiting me
here in the cave more show and tells later