Paul S. Endy Jr.

Paul and his Son
Paul S. Endy Jr. had gaming supply in his blood. Born in Monterey Park, California, in 1929, he worked as an electrician before going into sales and service at his father’s business, a gaming supply distributor and dice manufacturer called T.R. King & Company.

Paul Sr.’s business, which Endy joined in the early 1950s, would provide the seeds that Paul Jr. would eventually turn into the top gaming supply company in the nation. In 1963, with the help of his father, Endy and a partner, Curley Ashworth, bought a bankrupt dice company in Las Vegas. Because Endy brought his three sons in to help run the business, and in a tribute to his own father, he decided to name his new company Paul-Son Gaming Supply.

It would be gaming chips that Paul-Son would become most known for. Endy’s company developed custom-molded clay chips with personalized inlays—intricate graphics, photography and other features never before seen on a chip—and a constantly increasing number of anti-counterfeiting features. Over the years, the security features built into the clay chips became more and more sophisticated. (After the merger with Bourgogne et Grasset and thanks to their know-how and a long established experience in adding security features to a chip, Paulson security features culminated in the development of the microchip-embedded chip in 2003.)

By the 1990s, Paul-Son had grown with the industry, establishing offices around the United States and nurturing relationships with table game operators both in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. The explosive growth of the industry in the early 1990s with emerging riverboat and Indian casinos added more customers, which prompted Endy to take his company public. In 1994, an initial stock offering transformed Paul-Son Gaming into Paul-Son Gaming Corporation.

The new public company offered an expanded product line that included not only chips and dice, but playing cards, table layouts and other equipment, making Paul-Son a one-stop shop for everything in table game supply. The expanded product offerings and burgeoning business necessitated a manufacturing facility much larger than Paul-Son’s Las Vegas headquarters, so the company established a plant in San Luis, Mexico, to handle production of all Paul-Son products.

Paul Endy Jr. died in April of 1999, leaving a legacy not only of the best in table game supply, but of the best in service to the communities in which he operated. Endy had served as chairman and director of Westcare, a nonprofit treatment center for drug and alcohol abuse, and contributed to numerous other community organizations, including high school baseball, UNLV baseball, and the Boy Scouts of America. In Mexico, he and his wife funded the expansion of a home for elderly women and contributed extensively to local orphanages.

Paul Endy is a member of the Gaming Hall of Fame, and GPI USA aims to continue that tradition.


Bernard "Bud" Jones

Bud’s Passion
Bernard “Bud” Jones lived and breathed table game supply from the time he entered the business in 1934 until shortly before his death at the age of 86 in August of 2001. He worked every day at the Las Vegas office of the Bud Jones Company, running his company from its founding in 1965 until falling ill in 1999 at the age of 84.

After he passed away, his daughter, Kathleen Steele, told a Las Vegas reporter that Jones had no hobbies or interests outside of his business—it was his passion.

Bud Jones was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1915. His professional fate would be sealed when he answered a help-wanted ad in 1934 for work as a dice-maker. He learned and honed the craft of dice manufacturing over the ensuing two decades, as an employee, manager and eventually part-owner of casino supply ventures in Kansas City.

Jones moved his family to Nevada in the mid 1950s, after his supply business burned to the ground. By the early 1960s, Jones was ready to establish his own dice company. He officially opened the doors to the Bud Jones Company in 1965.

The Bud Jones Company went on to become the nation’s largest producer of casino-quality dice, and just as his competitor Endy at Paul-Son, Jones would soon expand his product line. The dice were soon accompanied by injection-molded plastic gaming chips. Jones was a pioneer in perfecting this style of chip, adding security features and beautiful designs and enhancing their feel and appearance.

He would also add gaming tables to his product line and, in 1973, Jones introduced coin-inlay gaming chips, which are manufactured of molded plastic surrounding an actual silver coin. This style of chip was developed to foil counterfeiters, but it also became quite popular with collectors, and with casinos as commemorative chips.

By the 1980s, Jones’ main line of injection-molded plastic gaming chips became one of the most popular American styles of chips used in European, Far East Asian and South African casinos. Jones, in fact, sold more chips overseas than he did in the United States, through an exclusive British distributor.

By the 1990s, the Bud Jones Company had customers in more than 500 casinos, in 50 nations around the world.

Along with Endy, Jones became one of the most trusted and well-loved vendors in the business. Bud Jones is also a member of the Gaming Hall of Fame. His greatest love was in overseeing the production of his precision-crafted dice and gaming chips. For personal reasons, he named no successor, and because Jones shared the same values as B&G CEO Gérard Charlier, he sold his business to the French company in 2000.

GPI USA will surely take good care of the business that was Bud’s passion, and will continue the tradition of quality craftsmanship and service that Jones personified for some 34 years.

Continuing the Tradition
Casino managers familiar with the trusted Paulson, Bud Jones and T-K brands of products can rest assured that the GPI USA division of Gaming Partners International Corp. will continue the tradition established by these legendary gaming vendors.

One of the earliest decisions made by the executives of GPI was that the combined company would make no changes to any product brand names of any of its former companies. That means the flow of products and the service relationships established by Paul-Son and Bud Jones will continue as they always have continued—as will the products of B&G under the GPI SAS subsidiary.

GPI has 75 years of experience in manufacturing gaming chips, with proven success worlwide. B&G products have always been at the forefront of the making of value chips. In terms of innovation, or new technology implemented in chips or dice, GPI SAS will give to both U.S. brands a new stimulus, a new breath.

The corporate name may be different, but the products will be the same or better. Another thing that will remain the same is the commitment to constant improvement of the products through technology to assure security and quality, and to provide an even better service to customers by mixing experienced regional sales managers from the former Paul-Son and Bud Jones companies with new and available sales persons.

Continuous research, development and improvement of chips, cards, dice and other table equipment was a hallmark of Paul Endy Jr. and of Bud Jones. It will remain a hallmark of GPI USA.

Paul-Son. Bud Jones.
They are names that are ingrained in the minds of practically every casino manager and table game purchasing executive in the United States.

The names are part of the cultural landscape and history of the table game business in America, and while the pioneers who owned them are no longer with us, their names live on in the GPI USA subsidiary of Gaming Partners International Corp.

The names represent the most trusted table game products—and sales organizations—in the business. Scores of large casinos in the Americas will not open their doors without being well-stocked with Paulson gaming chips, the familiar brand of clay cheque tracing its origins to the 1950s. Other casinos, particularly in Europe, swear by the injection-molded plastic Bud Jones chip, or the distinctive Bud Jones coin-inlay chip, or the Bud Jones dice that have been a mainstay of the industry almost as long as the industry itself has existed.

Paul-Son has long been known as a turn-key supplier of table game equipment, a single vendor that can be trusted to supply everything from chips and dice to playing cards, table game layouts and furniture. With the advent of GPI SAS, the turn-key nature of this operation is even more thorough with the addition of Bud Jones products and especially with the addition of Bourgogne et Grasset products manufactured by GPI, such as S2 chips, Full Face chips and plaques.

While the name of GPI USA may be new, the division’s operations and product lines carry a pedigree boasted by precious few suppliers to the casino industry, and a colorful history of two former competitors which are now one.

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