Chip Shuffling

I got an e-mail from someone who identified himself only as New Guy: "I love Texas hold'em; can you tell me the secret to shuffling chips one-handed?"



Walk into any large cardroom for the first time – or after a long absence – and the first thing you notice is the noise. It almost assaults you. And the noise you hear is not the shuffling of cards or the conversations at every table. It's a constant clack clack clack of chips clattering against chips. Circulate among the tables and you see at every one usually two or three players constantly shuffling and reshuffling stacks of chips from two piles into one, breaking them down, and going through it all again. You probably also see at least one person rolling chips down the inclined plane of his palm in a synchronized stream, have them scoot across the table each less than half a revolution ahead of the next, and scoop them all up as they clatter into his waiting other hand. This is something I can do.



You also may see one player bang a chip vertically down hard on another lying flat on the table with a backward snap such that the chip rolls forward several inches until the reverse rotation causes it to spin back to his waiting hand.



This is what greets you in brick-and-mortar cardrooms, and it's enough to drive some people crazy.



Who's doing this, and why? It's players who are in that cardroom day after day, year after year. You rarely find action players – that is, those who are in most pots (and who are sometimes referred to as live ones) – shuffling chips. They don't have time. It's the players who sit hand after hand folding most hands who do the chip tricks. In most games, not playing very many hands is a winning strategy, but it's boring. So, to keep themselves occupied and to release all of their nervous energy, many players have to do something with their hands. And what lots of them do is shuffle chips one-handed or perform other chip manipulations, all of which are somewhat noisy. And a cardroom full of chip rattlers becomes a cacophony. You sit there and play day after day, and after a while you don't even notice the noise, but it's there.



I admit to having been somewhat guilty myself, but only slightly, because what I did was noiseless. Many years ago a fellow in my no-limit draw game performed a clever chip trick. He held three adjacent chips between his extended thumb and next three fingers. With thumb and forefinger, he slid the two outer chips upward while the middle chip remained in place below them, held in position by the forefinger and now pinky. He then used the middle and ring fingers to rotate the lower chip 180 degrees, and slid the chip back up between the other two in a reversal of the first action. It sounds complicated, but basically what happened was the middle chip dropped down, twirled around once, and then popped back into position. The fellow was a little drunk and offered to bet $200 that no one at the table could do that trick. No one took him up on it. The trick intrigued me, and I spent nearly a year, between hands, trying to emulate it. Not only did I eventually master the maneuver, but I could do it with both hands simultaneously. I also improved on the trick by starting out flipping the chip farthest away from my palm over the other two such that it ended up closest to my palm. I kept hoping the guy would show up again and make the same bet, but, alas, I never saw him again. I can do it not just with chips, but quarters, too.



I can't walk chips across my knuckles, but I can balance a stack on my elbow, drop the elbow while arcing my lower arm around, and catch the entire falling stack in the hand of the same arm. It looks pretty impressive, but I never did it at the table because I'd drop the whole stack once in a while and they'd go flying everywhere.



To get back to your question, New Guy, you seem to imply that hold'em expertise and chip manipulation abilities are somehow related. They may be, but only to the extent that those who can shuffle chips effortlessly have put in lots of hours at the tables, and putting in lots of hours for some adds up to increased playing excellence. But the two abilities are not an ineluctable correlation. Many people have played in cardrooms for decades, and the only thing they have learned is a few chip tricks. I know old-timers who were regulars when I first started playing and who still play just as badly now as they did then.



So, New Guy, why do you want to shuffle chips one-handed? Do you want to add to the general noise? Or, do you want to look cool in front of your friends? If you're still determined, the advice I have is to start simply. Begin with the minimum it takes to shuffle, four chips. When you can do that flawlessly, start adding more chips in pairs. You'll eventually get to about as many as you can comfortably get your hand around, which is probably two stacks somewhere between 10 and 20 chips high each.



And remember, Google is your friend, and is the main resource to turn to for questions like this. Do a search on "chip tricks," and near the top you'll find several good sites. One of them, http://www.21ace.com/poker_chip_tricks.html, is particularly good, and illustrates the tricks I described. The site offers several more tricks, include chip shuffling. And http://pokerchiptricks.com/ goes one better, with online videos to help you learn.

Michael Wiesenberg's The Ultimate Casino Guide is available at fine bookstores and online. Send suggestions, suppositions, and suspect citations to [email protected].