What exactly are "chops" ?  I know they are good to have, but that's all.  Can someone please explain?

Thanks!

Honestly I don?t have a clue!

How did it come up anyway Jenny?

   
 I have been most things on stage -  A pie, Tree & even a banana! But not a chop as yet?

 
If I have got your question right?

It may mean to clip/cut,  "get in or act for your chop" or ?Gold fish? as in mouthing  your chops only-

Chookas Jenny 

  I just had a thought Jenny! "Acting chop? could mean to get your mouth to act. Chop is slang for mouth, as in to be offered food to eat by someone - "Get your chops (mouth) around that mate".
Your ?choppers? are also your teeth!
I hope this helps?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't know!

"Paying your dues" by experience was most likely the meaning intended when I heard it.  Possibly even the speaker was just using a phrase that he had heard and didn't really know what it meant.

The context was whether some people (not me) "had chops."  According to this guy, they didn't.  Anyway, I thought perhaps it meant talent, or to some specific trait. 

I'd also heard it a long time ago in reference to musicians where they said they got together and "traded chops."  I thought at that time it meant showing off musical riffs.  Maybe they were telling tales of experiences they had endured.

Thanks everyone, you all earn "a chop" by helping out newcomers like me!

Jenny 

I just searched on Google to see what I could find for "acting chops" ( The third or fourth item was this discussion thread.  )  The Random House Dictionary Word for the Day website had the following: 

Q: " Today I found the word "chops" twice in one article: "It's not as if they didn't have the talent or the chops," and "...to show off their acting chops." Where does this come from?

A:  This is a figurative use of an expression that originally comes from jazz.

The earliest relevant word here is chops meaning variously 'the mouth', 'the jaw', 'the lower cheek', 'the lips', etc. First recorded in the sixteenth century, this word is of uncertain origin. It is now chiefly slang.

By the 1940s, chops was being used in jazz to refer to a brass musician's embouchure, or the adjustment of the player's mouth to the mouthpiece, a direct application of the 'mouth' sense. This was soon extended to mean 'musical ability or skill' (of any instrument, not just brass or wind instruments), and finally 'ability or skill of any sort'.

The broad use of chops 'ability or skill of any sort' seems to have become common by the 1970s. "

I'd like to throw my two cents in here as well.  "Chop" is one of those words of obscure origin, which may have both Indo-European AND Asian roots, and therefor confused meanings.  For instance, in China a chop is a seal of approval signifying quality, usually as in "silk or tea of the first chop (reference 'cream of the crop')."  The first chop of beef may be a prime rib, the first chop (literally) of a bamboo shoot may well become a "chop stick!"  Doubtless, European traders, recognizing the word chop as being a sound related to their own, and using it frequently in buying Asian goods, brought the word back home with them in its new form.  "He's a lad of the first chop."  To earn your chops, then, meant to pay your dues until you had reached significant value, beginning at the lowest chop and working one's way to a place of the first chop, which is, I'm sure, where we all are. 

All of the other suggestions, by the way, also hold water, and that's what makes this idiom so fascinating!