How to Master Chip Tricks and Look the Part at Your Next Poker Home Game
Are you planning to shuffle up and deal in your friends at a poker home game anytime soon? Home games are usually the perfect mix of friendly competition and banter, bringing a taste of “Sin City” to your living room.
Think of a poker home game along the same lines as a visit to a tourist-haven poker room in Las Vegas. There’s several of them located up and down the Strip. To the south end of the Strip, there’s the Excalibur, which is ultra-cheap to stay and play so it attracts a laid-back crowd. It’s one of the best environments for poker novices to learn and have low-stakes fun in Vegas and home games should be treated in exactly the same way – unless you’re hosting a high-stakes showdown with pals that really know what they’re doing of course.
Either way, it can be useful to master some of the many chip tricks professional poker players pull off to add a touch of flair to your game. Chip tricks help to make you look like a seasoned card shark – even if you’re not! It’ll also help to keep the energy alive and kicking in between hands.
Chip tricks can actually be useful to help you hide physical tells from your friends in home games. If you’re a bag full of nervous energy and you’re confident you’ve got the best hand, focusing on chip tricks can keep your mind and hands fixed on other things while you put your opponents to tricky decisions. It’s possible that your skills will psych out your friends; especially if you want to portray yourself as strong when you feel like you’ve got the weakest hand.
The Thumb Roll requires a steady hand
The Thumb Roll is an easy yet visually impressive starter trick, with only a steady hand and a healthy dose of dexterity needed. Practice with a single chip in your dominant hand. Use your thumb to roll the chip across your fingers, across your index finger to your little finger, before catching it in the crease of your palm.
It’s one of the best starting points for chip tricks as the Thumb Roll encourages finger control. Once you’ve nailed the Thumb Roll, the others start to feel more doable, honestly!
Be precise with your Muscle Pass
Your next step should be the Muscle Pass. By now, you should have honed your precision, but you now need to introduce a little bit of power into the mix. To complete the trick, you need to propel a chip from the palm of your hand into the air using only the tension built up in your hand muscles.
Put a poker chip in the squidgy bit between your index finger and thumb. All you need to do is squeeze your palm, which should generate enough force to launch the chip into the air. It’s a handy stunt as a transition between other chip tricks.
Show-off your finesse with a Knuckle Roll
The Knuckle Roll may be a chip trick you’re familiar with, even if you’ve never played poker before. It’s a stunt that’s synonymous with casino tables and probably the one trick that gets the most airtime or imagery online.
A Knuckle Roll involves rolling a chip over the top of your knuckles. Start by holding a chip between your thumb and index finger. Use the former to gently nudge the chip onto the knuckle of your index finger. The chip should then smoothly cascade across each remaining knuckle, before catching it neatly with your pinky.
Once you’ve mastered it, the Knuckle Roll should be one of the most fluid chip tricks going. The chip almost looks like it has a life of its own!
Hopefully these chip tricks have inspired you to get cracking and open that chip set well in advance of your next home game. Just make sure that by the time your pals knock at that front door you’ve got some slick moves to dazzle and bamboozle them, hand-after-hand.
