If you've ever watched a sleight-of-hand expert at work, you've probably seen him/her do this at least once or twice. He/she takes a coin and, almost too fast to see with a Mark I Eyeball, flips it down across his/her knuckles till it gets to his/her pinky. Guys in old gangster movies might be seen doing this also. Impressive?

Not really. To perform this minor feat of dexterity takes more practice than ability. The secret to making it look good is to rely on gravity to move the coin across your fingers and be confident enough to catch the coin on the way down.

The first step in training your hand to do this is to get used to the finger motions involved. The easiest way to do this is using a pencil, pen, or any other similar object. Hold the pencil between your index and middle fingers like a cigarette, somewhere near the middle of your fingers. Now flip the pencil around and over your middle finger so you can catch it with your ring finger. You should now be holding the pencil between your ring and middle fingers in the same fashion you were just holding it previously. Repeat the rotating so that you're now holding it with your pinky and ring finger. (If you need a visual reference, the pilots in the first classroom scene of "Top Gun" do this.)

Once you have mastered that, you can move on. Now, instead of using a pencil, use a coin. American quarters work well, but any coin that you're comfortable with will do. Do the same flipping motions with the coin as with the pencil. This may be a bit more difficult, and may require using your thumb to help, at first. A smart bit of advice is to use a penny at first, so if you drop it and lose it you'll have lost one cent instead of twenty-five.

Once you have mastered flipping a coin with your fingers, you can move up to nearer to you knuckles. Here is the tricky part. The secret, as stated above, is to let gravity do the work, and use your fingers just to catch the coin and flip it over towards the next knuckle. When the coin gets to your pinky, let it slide through to under your fingers (or inside your hand, whatever you want to call it) and use your thumb to push it back up to your index finger. Try not to worry about dropping the coin, as that will happen numerous times. In fact, if you keep a loose hold on the coin, instead of trying to guide it through every millimeter of movement, the flipping action will come much easier.

An easy way to practice is over a soft surface, like a bed or a desk with some papers on it. The papers tend to prevent the coin from bouncing and/or rolling too far, and a coin falling on paper makes much less noise than one falling on a hard surface.