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.

The butterfly is probably the coolest looking poker chip trick there is. It’s the most difficult too! Evelyn Ng performed this trick on a segment of “The Nuts” during the 2004 World Series of Poker. Antonio Esfandiari does a variation of this trick, but it’s quite a bit different.

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.

I don’t recall having seen this trick done in any of the poker episodes on TV, but I’ve seen it quite a few times at the poker table in casinos. Nothing flashy or exciting, but it’s the easiest poker chip trick you can find.

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.”

Poker amateurs may have first seen this trick when Gus Hansen performed it on an episode of the World Poker Tour. Dutch Boyd and countless others have also done it during World Series of Poker episodes. It is one of the hardest tricks to learn, but one of the most fun to do. Other popular names for the twirl are “chip spin” or “chip twirl.”

I first saw Dutch Boyd perform this trick during the 2003 World Series of Poker. You may have also seen this trick on “The Nuts” during the 2004 WSOP, where Antonio Esfandiari was doing it extremely fast with both hands at the same time. This trick can be tough to learn, but it always looks cool. When the knuckle roll is done fast enough, the chip looks like it floats over the fingers.

Dutch Boyd made this trick popular during the 2003 World Series of Poker in a segment aired on chip tricks. The finger chip flip is similar to the thumb chip flip, so be sure to learn it first. Other names for the trick may be “index chip flip,” “index flip,” or “finger chip flip.”

The idea behind the thumb chip flip is to lift a chip with your thumb and flip it over a number of chips that are lined up behind this chip. You may have seen several poker players on the World Poker Tour or World Series of Poker doing this trick. It is one of the easiest tricks to learn. Other popular names for the thumb chip flip are “front to back,” “thump chip flip,” or simply “chip flip.”