Poker Chip Tricks

By popular request I’m happy to finally post the poker chip trick everyone calls the Johnny Chan trick. This trick was made popular from the movie Rounders, in which Johnny Chan played himself. While playing poker against Mike (Matt Damon’s character) in Atlantic City, Chan was shown doing this poker chip trick several times.

You may have seen it called the back to front. I call it the switch because that is what you are doing…switching the location of one or more poker chips. I don’t like the name back to front, because depending on how you look at it, you are also doing a front to back with other chips while doing a back to front. At first glance, this trick looks very similar to a few of the other tricks, but it is quite a different move.

As far as I know, I made this trick up. I’ve never seen it done on TV or anywhere else. I was messing around with chips in my car on the way home from work one day and stumbled across this new trick. It’s not the easiest of tricks because I can’t even do it very good and I made it up.

Another Dutch Boyd trick displayed during the 2003 and 2004 World Series of Poker episodes. This is a neat trick because each poker chip actually loses contact with your hands while being executed.

Dutch Boyd is the only player I have seen do this trick. He did it during the chip tricks segment of the 2003 World Series of Poker. There isn’t anything exciting about the trick and it’s not very tough either. It’s just hard to perform it consistently. You may have heard it called the “chip bounce.”

Can you name a player that you haven’t seen shuffle chips during the World Poker Tour or World Series of Poker episodes? The sound of shuffling chips can be heard in poker rooms around the world. It happens to be my favorite trick, because once you learn it, you can’t stop. Another popular name for the shuffle is “riffle.”