stop tipping at 4/8, haters gonna hate. blame the casino

1) Have you ever worked at a job where tips were an important part of your income?

2) If you can't "afford" to tip @ 4/8, I hope that you choose not to play 4/8. Be fair to your dealer AND your table mates. IMO, "fair" tipping is part of common table courtesy. If you can't/won't give that common courtesy please, just don't sit down at all. And then to call the others "haters" when it is non-tippers behavior that is out of line is even worse.

You do better with hand analysis. No tipping is a horrible idea.

Saw one of my friends reading this post on his phone today. Pretty crazy when I realized it was a thread I started 3+ years ago.

Some of you prob know me on this name now, but to update -- since posting this I've prob logged 6000+ hours of 4/8 with a WR of like 0.5-0.6 BB/HR and I never really fixedy tip leak -- in fact when I started dealing myself it got worse. Even though poker has helped supplement my income for years, I've finally reached a point where I realize playing 4/8 is a waste of my time. I might play once in a while now to support or prop my game, but I I'm shooting for 75% off live hours to be at 8/16 or higher this year.

Also, with so much talk of downswings in the thread, I don't think ive suffered larger than a 150 BB down swing in normal 4/8 games (I did lose $907 in a FK, 5-handed auto-straddle session once). I'm not positive; I lost 5000 hours of filterable data in late July last year, but I'm quite positive I've never had a $1600 losing streak at the 4/8 level. I guess I've been absurdly lucky which is funny because I've felt overwhelmed with bad luck at times!

You were originally tipping $3 a pot so you tipped over $50.000 in this period. If it got worse (say $4 a hand) then your tips total around $72.000

Impressive tipping and win rate.

$4 a hand is definitely not my average. Back then it was prob just over $2 on average. Now it's about the same but I will hook up dealers that play on my shift more. Tipping other dealers is by far the worst part of being a dealer -- the favor is so seldom returned it's clearly better to just be a stiff.

I actually tracked tips when I played full time in 2012 -- and my total was well over $10,000 for the year. I Stopped tracking after that because it was so nauseating to look at. Still, my overall total is less than the $50k you're suggesting, for sure. Prob $30-$33k since mid-2011. Pretty sickening though.

Now that I'm planning on playing most of my hours out of town I should be able to cut back big time. At the end of the day, $1 a pot is plenty and like someone else already posted in this thread -- more is appreciated always, but $1/hand is perfectly fine with me.

Let's say that by not tipping, some 1 or 2 marginal $4/hour 4/8 winners become $6/hour winners. OK, great. They're still winning @ less than 1BB/HR, still not making much money, and after 1000 hours they have another $2000 in the pocket. So what? They're still making less than fast food wages. They don't have the time working at the local Walmart (or wherever) to be a standout employee who might get invited in to the management training program. They've basically taken money out of the dealer's pocket and put it in their own. Say what you will about how casinos should pay their employees a decent wage, they don't. Why not just still waiters everywhere? At least waiters don't enable poker players to make money.

imho, the reason to tip isn't because people will notice if you don't. As you mentioned, tit for tat doesn't really work. The reason to tip has to do with rewarding the service you get.

Sure, that's reasonable. I can't imagine anywhere you'd be expected to tip more than $1 on decent sized pots. Well, here in Colorado, people are big tippers. Even here, nobody will fault you for $1.

Making > 0 at 4/8 is an accomplishment. A big sample > 0.5BB/HR is an accomplishment. Nice job.

Hopefully 8/16 and higher work out for you. If you make it to 20/40, playing poker for income can make sense in a $/hour fashion. I'm guessing that the patience/discipline to win at lower stakes will be valuable tools playing higher.

I'm not suggesting to stiff dealers. I just have this irrational stigma in my own mind that $1 from me is cheap -- it's not. I've never once thought that when someone tossed me one chip. I have a good friend that frequently plays at my establishment that only tips $1 a pot if it's big and if he's winning... and it doesn't bother me at all. Other people make up for it.

Random factoid. I know a player with 5000 hours in a 20 game. His WR is just.over 1 and is worst downer is just 210 bets.

If you play in good passive games you will rarely if ever take huge downers.

It's a function of win rate. At a SD of 13 and WR of 1, a 2-sigma downer is 170 BB and a 3-sigma downer is 380 BB. Chop that WR to 0.5 and the 2-sigma downer goes to 340 BB and the 3-sigma downer to 760 BB.

At 4/8 it's just super hard to squeeze out another 0.5 because you're losing 3-4 to rake already. I mean maybe an expert can salmon run that **** but most people are going to end up in the ocean of broken dreams.

There's one other thing at work, I'm guessing. Let's say you go play the Bay101 every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evening. You know when to go there get a seat without too much wait. You may know the brush well enough to be on the list, even if they don't accept call ins and you're running late. When you sit down, often 7 people at the table are familiar to you and at most you are focusing on 1 or 2 new players. All this to say, it is really a comfortable environment. You're never really that stressed and mostly the poker is just you going and doing the stuff you know about. Suddenly, you're inching that win rate up over 3BB/100 and the graph starts to look smooth while running up and to the right.

The compounding parts of downswings are so much less likely for this player, because basically God told Moses that you were going to win tonight, they put it on a rock, and dropped it by the podium. All of the feed forward stuff that makes our instantaneous WR go south and not match our average WR, it is lessened for such a player. I'd guess that if you did strict "how often do big downers" happen calcs based on WR and SD, you'd end up talking about fat tails or other stats anomalies, really hitting on the fact that me dropping 75BB yesterday and 50BB the day before makes today not a day to back me -- correlation of results creeps in. Our 3BB/100 guy doesn't run into compounding situations as often and has more confidence reserve.

Agree that a high WR in a passive game has the double benefit of both the high WR and the passive people not stressing you as much.
If you're someone who should be playing 4/8, it is hard to generate the huge skill gap over rake + the field. Even as expert, the rake is still a solid opponent.

It is also possible to run well in placement of downers. Like instead of having two 150BB downers line up, you run well and win 100 in between. Most of us still whine about the break even stretch, but we don't have the mental game impact of the full 300.

As an addendum to how hard it is to generate that skill gap, consider what happens to your opponents when you crush them like that: they go from 3-4 BB/hr losers to 4-5 BB/hr losers. Imagine how quickly you'd know you were a winner at +3 BB/hr; imagine how small your downswings would be. Now imagine all those numbers in reverse: how quickly someone figures out they're a loser, how big of an upswing a loser can have.

At -3 BB/hr, people can still put together a lucky streak of a hundred hours. At -5 BB/hr, every overnight bender becomes a mathematically guaranteed loss. The number of people willing to play as such certain losers gets small really quick, especially at higher stakes. You need them to hit that +50 BB streak once in a while so they have hope.

Yeah, working in a poker room it's pretty alarming how many "regulars" go on extended hiatus.

It's also amusing some of the newer, younger players think they have it all figured out after running good for a week. I've heard more than a few of them talk about how easy the game is. Most of them aren't playing within a couple months. Reminds me of myself ten years ago.