A Chip Set For Chip Tricks
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.
With the growth of interest in both the game of poker in general and the idea of chip tricks in particular, a virtual industry of explanation and demonstration has now sprung up. Not only have people written illustrated books and posted internet articles explaining how to do these tricks, but with the more recent advent of videos on places like www.youtube.com and www.metacafe.com, experts can show in real time how it’s done. So the learner now has access both to texts and live action to learn how to use his or her special chip set for doing tricks.
Of course, some of the poker chip sets contain “gaffed” chips, or those that are slightly rigged in order to facilitate doing the tricks. But many tricks can be performed with ordinary chips as well. In fact, some instructors advise people to learn the tricks with the heavier clay poker chip sets, because after becoming proficient with those sorts of chips, they’ll be able to do tricks easily with any other type of lighter chip. So whether a player wants to do tricks with chips from a regular set, or would like to add the occasional gaffed chip set to their repertoire, these tricks are an entertaining extra feature that makes poker that much more fun.
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