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October 11th, 2008 admin Leave a comment Go to comments

Texas Holey

Turning Tricks

What’s in a trick? No riffle can change your cards just as no knuckle roll can change your opponent’s. Yet players spend hours upon hours perfecting the peculiar art of playing with chips. Why? While the long term benefits of adroit chip trickery has yet to be studied by the scientific community, here are a few observations on the upsides of an acrobatic stack.

Boredom: In the beginning, there was boredom. If you plan on playing poker with any sort of regularity, then you better learn how to deal with a whole Lot of nothing; even the most aggressive of players will be doing naught but sitting and folding pre-flop at least half of the time. And thus, chip tricks were born. The first real benefit to being a chip trickster is having something to do when that rash of 3-8 off-suits starts. Whether you are an experienced chip magician or a burgeoning riffler, the time you have between folding hands can be spent practicing tricks. Furthermore, once you get good enough to do a trick without focusing on it, the trick can become a therapeutic aid for your game. You can sit and really zero in on an opponent as your hand skillfully fiddles with your money – it works like a pair of Baichi balls or Chinese Health Balls (those belled balls that you roll around in your hand.) In this way, chip tricks fight boredom in two different manners: 1, they can provide a subconscious door into a more intense focus just like any other repeated motion and 2, they are just plain something to do.

Intimidation: In order to have learned how to do chip tricks, it follows that one would have had to have had chips enough to practice with in the first place. Naturally, the ability to perform chip tricks acts as a sort of credential at the poker table – it lets other players know that you have had the opportunity to handle chips before in your life. More than the passive credential-building effect, chip tricks can present an image of specific hand strength. Recall Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” for a moment. Remember that scene outside of Vito Corleone’s hospital? The one where Enzo the Baker and Michael stand down the slowly cruising car of heavily armed murderers without so much as a knife on either of them? After their bluff works, a jittery Enzo is unable to light his own cigarette so Michael, without so much as a twitch in his finger, lights it for him. Michael, the man who will become the next Godfather, then marvels for a moment at his own calm hand. A coolly executed chip trick can accomplish much the same thing at a poker table. It’s one thing to keep a stoic poker face when you are trying to pull off a bluff – it’s another thing to remain loose enough to pull off a chip trick. So the next time you move in on the river, try this: do a few tricks, picture yourself as the most powerful Mafioso on planet Earth and see if that doesn’t make you just the slightest bit more comfortable.

Confidence: Few things are as important as a player’s confidence level at the poker table. While the best way to build up self-esteem is by winning pots, chip tricks can have an effect as well. If you get pretty good at playing with chips people will want to watch you do it. Hey, it’s cool to see what some people can do with those little plastic and clay things! Even the many players at the poker table who try to seem unflinchingly uninterested in anything are susceptible. After all, the human being is an imperfect machine and if you put interesting enough stuff in front of anyone, they will eventually steal a glance. Those same stone players can be cracked with enough chip wizardry. Imagine catching an unreadable poker shark like Chris “Jesus” Ferguson enamored with the little movements that your hands are doing. You catch him watching and he quickly looks away. You just got someone who is trying as hard as they can to seem uninterested to lose themselves in some “meaningless” tricks. Few things feel better than playing with people’s minds.

Performance: If you get absurdly good at playing with chips, you might just get some tips from other people at the table. Players can get generous while playing poker, especially when they have won a big pot and are up a lot of money. While it may not happen much of the time, you’ll be sure to snag a chip or two every once and a while. I was playing Omaha at the Wynn in Las Vegas with this Chinese guy who I swear was a Jedi wizard. He wasn’t a particularly good Omaha player but holey moley, he did this trick where he rolled four chips perfectly down his right hand, across the table then smashed his left hand on top of three of the four rolling chips and somehow popped the fourth one up off the table and made it land perfectly on the top of his stack. Of course, this black magic was merely the piece of resistance of an array of riffles, butterflies and rolls that at one point even drew the Pit Manager over to watch. When the Chip Gymnast lost a hand that would have meant the end of his chips, the winner of the pot actually gave him back ten chips ($50) just to keep him at the table.

The best way to start learning how to perform chip tricks is to ask people doing ; most people are happy to share their methods. If you are really serious about learning how to play around, then you should get yourself a set of good chips and practice at home but don’t get the really cheap plastic ones because they do not behave like actual casino chips. A good chip set can be really expensive but you can always just google “free poker gifts” and you’ll get a list of sites lining up to give you free stuff. Get good enough and you won’t have to bluff people out of their money – you can just trick them out of it.

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