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Readers began asking us about the veracity of the following item in 1997: Although the chips issued by casinos in Las Vegas (and elsewhere) are supposed to be used for gaming purposes only, they are often treated as a de facto form of currency. Players often give gaming tokens as tips outside of gaming areas (e.g., to valets, cab drivers, restaurant servers), barter with them, or even offer them as donations to charities or religious organizations. Recipients of such tokens don't generally encounter problems cashing (moderate amounts of) them in at their issuing casinos. While gaming tokens do turn up in the collection plates of Las Vegas churches, those churches (Catholic or Protestant) don't all send them out to a nearby Franciscan monastery for sorting and redemption by designated chip monks. Churches generally accumulate gaming tokens until they each individually tab one or more of their workers to take the chips around to casinos and redeem them for cash. It is true that one church in Las Vegas, the Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer, once had a Franciscan friar on staff who made the rounds of casino cages and thus, in the fashion of the joke, he was dubbed the chip monk. Church Employees tasked with handling chip redemptions at various Las Vegas-area churches are sometimes also referred to as chip monks in furtherance of the joke, but they are neither real monks nor are they employed by monasteries that sort and redeem the tokens. The above-quoted bit represents one of several bits of well-traveled humor that play on the punning duality of chipmunk and chip monk (jokes necessarily set in a religious context), with the following providing another such example: Now that the Nevada Gaming Control Board has ruled that casinos can no longer cash each other's chips for the public, the incidence of gaming tokens in collection plates has dropped off considerably at some churches that have stopped soliciting such donations. Slot machine tickets and winning sports book slips are now more commonly used as a form of currency for donations.
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