I find this annoying too. The chip races are on break, so what exactly are they trying to do to save time?

I would think it would be easier to just leave the dealers alone and let them do their job. I know what my chip total was going to break.

Unless my dealer is Men the Master I can be 100% confident in that total.

There are dealers and floors that promote 'the gathering' so they can get longer breaks or do what they consider less work during the chip up. Me? I'd prefer to keep trying to get as many hands out as possible for the players and slow the game down as little as possible.

Very often, the collectors end up asking people for their small chips while the action is literally on them or the person they're asking. I have to re-route my pitches around people trading chips back and forth. Sometimes people are throwing chips out during action and it confuses people that are in the hand. It just slows things down. It's not a big deal, but it peeves me a little that many of these 'helpers' are slowing things down more than the time they're saving.

But of course, if we don't take all the small chips from everyone, they inevitably put out 2000 in t100 chips or the entire table calls the t600 bet with two black chips and 400 in green by tossing them in sloppily so I have to stack them and count them to make sure they're right before pulling in the bets.


So I guess it comes down to I don't ****ing know.

Depends on the room. Mine does it as you describe, basing it on the theory that a dealer (or another player) can not make a hand live. I've learned here that this is in the minority though.

This actually did occur, but I was able to successfully persuade our manager years ago to abolish that awful rule so it was irrelevant. One day maybe somebody can explain to me why a hand should magically be dead because it grazed the muck.

(Pardon me, but I’m very passionate about a magic muck rule being terrible)

For IWTSTH, isn't touching the cards to the muck symbolic, not "magic muck"?

In a good room toch8ng the muck does nothing. They might do it to INDICATE the hand is dead. But the hand is alive or dead per the rules, not by it touching the muck in some magical manner.

In a well run room with good rules,yes. But there are still plenty of places that believe the muck is some how magic and the touching actually does kill the hand.

I have seen or heard the following. I saw a dealer forget to touch the muck and turn over a winner, IWTSTH was not invoked by current winner, then try to push the pot to this new winner. And when challenged the floor said since cards did not touch the muck the hand was live. So dealer was at that room right.

I had a dealer tell me... since I was touching the muck as soon as I touched his cards they were dead. Luckily for that player, the floor did not agree that the magic of the muck was passing through the dealer. I had asked if everyone’s hand was dead because they were all touching the table and so was the muck.

I once had a *manager* tell us the dealer's hand is an extension of the muck.

Took me ten years to get the wince off my face.

So by that logic, technically the stub is dead.

The poker room manager/the guy who taught poker (poker and pit dealers aren't separate) also told me the same thing. I had the same reaction you did.

Yeah I overheard that "explanation" once on a floor call about a decade ago.

Entire table giving a lady **** for wearing Virginia Cavs gear, telling her she got a "lucky" win last night.

I don't know much about college hoops, but it's clear that everyone hates Virginia, and their "boring" defensive style....but it's still unsettling to see everyone just UNLOADING on a woman. It was uncomfortable.

I'm ashamed to admit that I was slow to react because being the local Patriots fan around here, *I'M* usually the target of these things, and I did take a few moments to feel relief that it was someone else's turn in the barrel for a change.

Most of them get it out of their system quickly, but one guy won't shut up about it. I was already discomforted by guys talking to woman this way, so I didn't let this guy go too long. I turned to address him, and lifted my eyes from the felt for the first time this down, to see:

He's wearing a Patriots cap!

This was more than I could countenance. "Hey, why don't you shut your mouth, you in the Patriots cap! Let somebody else enjoy their win, for once."

Oops. That was WAY more mouthy than it should have been.

But he took it like a man. No more was said about it. I got away with that one.

Just saw a new way to take a bad beat.

Guy posts behind the button in the must-move game. While I'm pitching, at least 5-6 players in the main game quit at once.

Everyone in the MM, except the new guy, is moved to the main game.

I timed myself once on a table that didn't have a shuffle machine. I was able to do the entire raceoff and suit both decks in 7 minutes 30 seconds and I wasn't really rushing it.

Remodel over. Some of our tables are placed a little close together. As I squeezed between the chairs and drink tables trying to get to the box, I cracked, "It's like I'm burroughing to rescue some Chilean miners!"

A commercial comes on during the game tonight for the new S10 phone. A poker player scoffs, "... and the big innovation is that if your battery is low, you can lay it back-to-back on someone else's S10 and get a charge from their battery. No one is ever going to do that! What are you gonna do, walk up to people and ask them use their phone to charge yours? That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen!"

I didn't have the heart to tell him that some folks have friends and families they actually hang out and spend time with, go out and do/see things together--not just poker strangers.

That reminds me of my first trip to LA to play poker. I was in a 20-40, and at the time this was a pretty big game for me with all flops being multi-way. As I look down to see my AA, the table is mucking out of turn. Everyone is running outside to see 2 players fight; there is just me and the dealer sitting there, so I pick up the blinds with my AA.

LOL!

lol thats hilarious. im going to guess he was at least 45 too

He was. Nice call.

Same reaction to the "people" who show up Christmas morning wanting to know why it's so slow.

So it was asked of me that I tell some stories from my days of dealing in the underground clubs in New York since it has been kinda slow in here.

Fox's Club
A bit of some background about me -- I basically grew up in the poker world. My grandmother was a player/dealer decades ago (her boyfriend ran a large club in Queens, NY) and she started teaching me 7 Stud, 5-Card Draw Hi, and NL Hold'Em starting when I was 6 years old. We would play with a cheap Hoyle chipset she had purchased from the local grocery store. Occasionally, I even beat her — I’ll never be sure to this day if she let me win, but I’ll always hold those memories close. Poker was something we always did together and did often. It would be unusual to see my Grandma without a deck of cards on her.

As I got older, my whole family would play together. When I reached middle and high school, I would host multi-table $20-$50 buy-in tournaments at my house and there would be about 40-50 of us at my house playing poker, socializing, eating, and doing what kids do. We were all terrible and had no idea what we were doing, but we were all having fun and little did I know it, but I was getting a taste of what was to come in terms of my career later on in life.

When I hit 16 years old, a friend of mine from high school — Joey — who had gone off to college in Queens at St. John’s had come back home for the summer. He had been introduced to a very large and popular underground club in College Point, NY. At the time, he was making a regular income from playing small stakes MTT’s on Full Tilt instead of having a regular job during college, and naturally found his way into live poker. This was my first introduction to the underground poker world. In addition to playing online with him, I accompanied him and a couple of his college buddies one night to play $1/$3 NL at a live underground club. I was able to play because I had made some substantial money from running and eventually selling my own web hosting business while in high school. My other passion that I had started learning from a very young age was computer programming. I was coding in Visual Basic by 11 years old because a friend of my father’s, who was a software developer, had decided that I had shown some aptitude for the field and took an interest in mentoring me. I was lucky to have been given the opportunity of his time, teachings, books, etc. Anyway, off we went to Fox’s Club — Fox was the connected mob guy who owned the club. The game was protected and everyone knew it. It was a very social place.

If you’ve ever been to an underground club, then you know that the quality of the customer service and experience can vary greatly from game to game. Fox’s game was the creme of the crop, it was absolutely top notch. It ran everyday, night and day.

It was located in a large, multi-story industrial lot which sat right near a main intersection, which meant lots of traffic — a very good thing because the traffic to and from the game just blended in with the usual activity.

When you pulled in, you could park anywhere you wanted out of the tens of dozens of spots. It didn’t matter where you parked anyway — I’ll get to why in a minute. Then, you would walk upstairs to the 2nd story to come stop in front of a giant steel door with a buzzer and several cameras positioned in front.

When you rang the bell, they’d ask you who you were, you’d tell them how and who invited you, and in a minute or two you’d be buzzed in through the first steel door. After entering, you’d come to a second steel door with another camera positioned in front, which only opened from the inside.

When you finally entered the room, it was gorgeous — clean, large, comfortable, and was equipped with everything you wanted in a club. A full-sized kitchen, multiple clean bathrooms (one even had a shower), a lounge area, a high limit room, waitresses, a bunch of large flat screen TV’s, and a smoking room among other things. The first thing you’d notice was that they had 6 high-quality poker tables paired with executive chairs, not including the one in the high-limit room. This club was spacious.

As you walked in, a valet would ask for your keys and he would go fetch your vehicle and park it in an organized fashion amongst the others. You’d then make your way over to the podium and tell the floor which game you wanted to play — they usually had at least several games going — $1/$3, $2/$5, and $5/$10 NL and higher when it ran, but the much higher games were much more private.

Strapped with $1,000 in cash on me, I request a seat in the $1/$3 game and eventually make my way onto the table. The max buy-in was $500, which I opted for because most stacks at the table were deep. It didn’t really matter anyway — this was my first time playing in an underground poker club and I was nervous as hell. I didn’t know how to act, was totally naive to my safety, I was 16 years old and I was clearly “the kid” in the club.

I remember winning one of my first pots, and a mid-30’s Asian guy sitting next to me taps me on the shoulder.

“Aren’t you going to tip the dealer?”

“What do you mean? Are we supposed to do that?”

“Of course, they work on tips. When you win a pot, toss them a buck, if it’s a big pot then maybe a redbird or two.”

“Oh, uh… I see… I’m sorry, I didn’t know…” and I toss the dealer a buck.

Over the course of the summer and playing there a dozen or so times, I began to take notice how much these dealers were making. Back then, in this particular club, dealers were well taken care of and I managed figure out that they were pulling in at least $1,000 per shift depending on their duties and how long they spent in the box. Some guys had multiple roles, would often spend time on the phone with players, some would work the cage area, some would floor other times, etc.

The questioned then dawned upon me — why am I risking my money playing this game, when I could learn how to deal it and be guaranteed to make money without any risk?

That was when I started to become friendly with Big Mike — one of the regular dealers. I wanted to deal and I wanted a job there… How was I going to make this happen? How could I pass up learning how to make $1k a night at a job that looked like it could be a lot of fun?

To be continued…

Awesome.

What dinesh said.

I wasnt going to read all that text but because of two good reviews I will.