Gaming Partners International

Daniel Senard

The company that is now the GPI SAS subsidiary of Gaming Partners International Corporation was known to casino operators across the globe for decades by the names of the two pioneers of table game supply who were its founders: Bourgogne et Grasset, or as it was more commonly known, B&G.

B&G’s mission—which carries on in the form of GPI SAS —was always to provide the highest quality chips, plaques and jetons, and more recently, roulette wheels, while working with its customers to ensure the highest possible level of security for the sensitive equipment.

In fact, security was the main reason for the founding of Bourgogne et Grasset. In the 1920s in Beaune, in the Burgundy region of France, lithographer Etienne Bourgogne and engineer Claudius Grasset were working to pioneer the use of plastics for use in items such as brooches, hair slides and plastic playing cards. The partners were the first to master the art of plastic film printing. One day in 1925, Claudius Grasset read in the newspaper Le Figaro that a player had broken the bank at the Monte Carlo Casino to the tune of 600,000 Francs, and after he had left, the casino’s managers realized he had done it with counterfeit chips made of solid ivory and mother of pearl.

Bourgogne and Grasset saw an opportunity to use their plastics research and their technical skills to address the counterfeiting problem. The partners got to work on producing a new generation of chips that would offer casinos total security. They perfected an ingenious process by which the impression of the chip was protected by a thin plastic film, which made it practically impossible to imitate them.

The partners sent some samples to the general manager of the Monte Carlo casino, Monsieur Blanc. Blanc’s reply came in the form of a first chip order, and Bourgogne et Grasset was born as a gaming supplier.

B&G built a solid reputation over its first two decades, and in 1945, the company was purchased by another innovator, Daniel Senard.

Senard, who purchased B&G following his return from five years in a Nazi detention camp during World War II, gave the company a new dimension, developing even more security features for the products. He added features such as color stripes, see-through windows (“lunettes”), white and golden lace, lamé, and invisible prints, all groundbreaking anti-counterfeiting features that gave B&G chips, plaques and jetons an unprecedented level of security.

Soon, the company’s service area had expanded across Europe. In short order, the word was out about the high quality and counterfeit-resistant properties of B&G products, and soon, the vast majority of casinos not only in France, but in all of Western Europe, were buying their chips from B&G. The B&G logo appeared in Germany, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Greece and England, and the company’s round chips and rectangular plaques would eventually be dominant in all corners of the world—Macau, the Philippines, Malaysia, Australia, Chile, Argentina, South Africa and Canada. The late Shah of Iran and the late King Farouk of Egypt both had their personal chips made in B&G’s Beaune plant.

B&G always adapted quickly to new challenges and market conditions. When the Bud Jones plastic injection-molded gaming chip, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, gained widespread popularity in Europe during the 1980s, B&G developed its own line of “American-style” plastic injection-molded chips, and launched it in 1990.

This was a turning point for B&G. Production expanded dramatically from the traditional jetons and plaques, creating a product line with the widest range of gaming chips available on the market. Daniel Senard decided to sell his company in February 1994 to a group of investors led by one of his sons in law, Gerard P. Charlier, a Stanford University graduate, who had been on the board of B&G since 1985 and involved in the reorganization of B&G since 1992. Daniel Senard died in 1998. With the introduction of the Euro in January 2002 as the new currency for most of the EU countries, Bourgogne et Grasset was chosen in 2000 and 2001 as the sole chip and plaque supplier by more than 250 European casinos, that is to say 90 percent of the market.

The company’s growing list of customers around the world eventually prompted B&G to expand its product line beyond the chips, plaques and jetons that had been its mainstay for decades. Fifteen years ago, the company started to manufacture quality roulette wheels in the Beaune plant. In addition to wheels for both American and French roulette games, the company began supplying gaming tables and other supplies, until its mission to diversify into a full-service gaming supply house led executives to the acquisition of the Bud Jones Company in 2000 and the merger with Paul-Son Gaming.