I know for a fact that professional poker players are willing to play privately with chips from well-known casinos, including the Bellagio. And the Bellagio doesn't discourage them by being too particular about which poker player returns which chips. I'm sure other kinds of gamblers do the same. This gives them real street value.
And if a random professional poker player shows up with a random stolen chip that was won in a private poker game, the Bellagio has a choice. They can refuse to accept the chip back, knowing full well that word will get around and poker players won't want to trust Bellagio chips, or they can stand by the official rules and not accept the chip.
They may or may not. The point is that they have an incentive to accept them back under some circumstances.
If they do get one of these back in, perhaps the best thing for them to do is to interview the holder heavily about where he got it and then decide whether to honour it or not.
Yeah, but we're talking $1.5 million in stolen chips. Circulating that much money is going to take a lot of effort. I mean, I can't imagine you just walk in to a private poker match toting a case of $25k Bellagio chips and everyone just assumes you're legit. You're going to be vetted... big time.
I just don't get the angle. Why steal poker chips when there are other big-ticket items that are much more easily liquidated. Hell, gold has been well over $1000/oz for some time now. A 100 lb gold haul from a few jewelry stores will produce the same market value. You're going to take a haircut when you fence it, but who says you're not going to take the same haircut when you try to pass $1.5 mil in poker chips.
If all the chips have an RFID serial number in them, wouldn't they know which chips were used in the poker rooms as opposed to the craps table?
You could argue that a poker player could launder the 25K chips back through the bellagio craps table, but I bet any high-demomination chip presented at the table is checked out somehow during play.
the big difference here, as a few others have pointed out, is that the guy who stole this chips is an outlaw pursued by the police and the casino is aware that these chips were stolen.
the laundering thing you described actually worked on a large scale for the MIT blackjack team (at least according to "bringing down the house"), but that's because the casino was unaware that these chips were illicit (it also helps, of course, that the MIT blackjack team members were operating within the law - there's a huge different between the casinos wanting to bar you and the feds wanting to arrest you, a fairly major point lost in the movie adaptation).
And if a random professional poker player shows up with a random stolen chip that was won in a private poker game, the Bellagio has a choice. They can refuse to accept the chip back, knowing full well that word will get around and poker players won't want to trust Bellagio chips, or they can stand by the official rules and not accept the chip.