As people play poker, of course the main use of a chip set is to place their bets during the game itself. But many players also enjoy becoming proficient at another entertaining activity connected to the game, which is doing tricks with the poker chips. You may think this is just a casual by-product of the game, something minor that people do to keep themselves interested during lulls in the play, but doing tricks with chips is becoming a gaming discipline all its own.
These tricks are something like coin tricks done by magicians, except that now and then other poker accessories are used to add dimensions that are particular to poker alone. Many of the tricks even have their own names, such as the “3-Fly,” “Drifter,” or “Grandma’s Shawl,” for example. Some involve twirling a chip around the fingers, the same way magicians make quarters roll over and over around their knuckles. Others are tricks of shuffling and re-shuffling. The “Grandma’s Shawl” uses Chinese-style chips, which involves threading something through the holes in their centers, and then managing to interchange them with chips that don’t have holes.
Some of these tricks are so elaborate that expert players have written books on how to do them, for example the 2006 book, “Chip Tricks: Look Like A Poker Pro” by Ross Watson and Jen Teti. With the help of volumes like these, and with those texts, photos and internet articles more recently augmented by videos posted on the internet on sites like YouTube and Flickr, even the novice player can now begin to learn how to use their special chip set to do entertaining tricks.
Those particular chip sets may contain chips that are notched or rigged (a practice known as “gaffing”) in order to perform specific tricks, but there’s a wide range of poker accessories that can cover every aspect of this entertaining part of the game. The number of resources available to the learner grows day by day, whether those involve illustrated books by experts, internet articles and video demonstrations, or even the acquisition of a special chip set containing chips specially designed for the more elaborate tricks.
Jeremy Larson is a foremost expert in the natural cures for acid reflux field. His work has been extensively published in various online publications in the areas of acid reflux. For more information on the treatment, visit RemedyForAcidReflux.com.