To be fair to the dealer, it may not be their pitch mechanics. Some players are terrible about receiving cards. They will constantly be moving their hands over the landing area or will crowd the area in front of them with drinks, napkins, card holders, etc and then put their hands in the only open space in front of them.

As a dealer, I would estimate that 75% of the time I have exposed a card (or possibly exposed a card) while pitching cards it is because of trying to make a last second adjustment to the pitch because of the players actions.

Also, even dealers with perfect technique will occasionally have an exposed card. No human controlled action will ever be perfect every time.

Then there is the whole speed aspect of pitching.. Recently I had a discussion with a player who complained about an exposed card. Which would they prefer:

A. Get 25 hands in the dealers 1/2 hour down but during one of those hands a card will be exposed on the pitch.
B. Get 20 hands in the dealers 1/2 hour down with every hand being dealt perfectly with no exposed cards.

The casino, the dealer, and all advantaged poker players should choose A. Superstitious players and cranky old men playing for their $1.00 per hour comp would choose B.

For me this is basically the Golden Rule of "treat others as I would like them to treat me"

If one of the cards dealt to me is exposed I would appreciate it if someone would bring it to the dealer's attention when it happened so that it could be easily rectified.

I will always say something if I see a card unless I am folding and it is virtually 100% clear to me that nobody else could have seen it. So mostly I just say "exposed card".

The bigger problem isn't about dealers exposing cards but players themselves doing it. Especially when its a guy in the 5 or 6 seat who picks up his cards in a way that the seats next to him have to do gymnastics not to see them. It rarely goes well when I mention it (which is always). If it were me I would appreciate the info that I need to be more careful when looking at my cards...

You are very rare.

Usually it's "So don't look!" as if I'm being an ass hole.

Or the dealer wants me to say exactly what card I saw.
"Black face card" or "red small card" isn't enough.

So I just keep quiet these days.

I agree with you and with the OP 100% I used to say something too. Not worth it. Now, the only time I'll say a word is if the dealers asks "did anybody see that" and nobody else responds. THEN, I'll speak up. But that's it.
The first time I had a floor ask "what card did you see" was the last time I spoke up. I'm not wasting time, playing games.

I have to be very sure before speaking.

Once in a friendly league, I thought I saw a card, a red 9 or something like that, and it triggered a misdeal. Turned out the guy had pocket kings (black!).

I think that an underrated reason not to say what card was flashed is that bad live players HATE the idea of “having the cards change from what they are supposed to be.” Probably why so many players get weirdly pissed about this.

@JimL…

So you are willing to accept a 4% failure rate in a dealer’s pitch mechanics. Are you willing to accept similar fault rate in other aspects of dealing? Over takes one pot per down? Misreads one board every four downs? How about the game in general?

Btw the dealer pitch won’t generally make 20% difference in hands per. Consider how little time a good dealer spends pitching as a % of the hand duration. Hands per down is controlled be the players much more than dealer. Thus your entire premise might sound good it is really a false dichotomy.

I seem to remember watching a WPT tournament from the Aviation Club in Paris. The dealer didn't pitch cards the way American dealers do. Rather s/he would put the card on the table (as if it were coming from a shoe) and slide it towards the player. To me it seems significantly safer in terms of avoiding flashing a card, flipping a card because it hits a player's chips or hands.

Is this a better or safer technique?

Sealing the card in an envelope and mailing it to the player's home address with proper postage is safer by that definition. It's about tradeoffs.

Huh? You 4% number is way off.

Two cards to 8 players for 25 hands is 400 pitched cards per down. 1 mistakenly pitched card a down out of 400 is a quarter of a percent failure rate.

Of course not, that is absurd. Of course I am not suggesting that the game be sped up by accepting dealers misreading boards and over-raking pots. Rather dishonest on your part to imply I am accepting of those errors.

It was not a false dichotomy. You are just missing the point.. I don't know if you are just missing the point or are just being dishonest again. Either option is your problem. Not mine.

Yes, that is much safer and there would be far fewer exposed cards (by a couple of orders of magnitude) but it would also drastically slow the game down (contrary to what Fore says in the post above). As others have mentioned, it is about tradeoffs. Accepting a really small number of pitch errors that are easily correctable and do not affect the game is generally preferable to a slower game.

You literally suggested a dichotomy and provided its numbers.

This is great. I need to go back to all those six sigma jerks who were always whining about my defect rate and tell them that they should stop measuring defects by the affect it has on the end product, but on the defect rate relative to each discrete step in the production process.

Game changing.

How many hands per hour do you want to play?

In over 25 years of dealing I've never been accused of flashing cards on my pitch.

1 out of 25 deals is 4%. The error will impact 4% of the hands. But even with your numbers 0.5% of the players hand will be spoiled and need correcting. That time will kill your speed gain. Even a half percent hand error rate is excessive.

As to what you will accept. I did not imply anything. You stated you will accept a flashed card per down to get five more hands per down. No imply by me. On the other errors I clearly asked if you were willing to accept them. Again I implied nothing. I asked

But since you will accept those flashed cards error, why won’t you accept the other dealer errors? good dealers won’t make those errors at those rates but sloppy ones trying to go faster than they can will make all of those errors at an unacceptable rate.

As to the dichotomy, your premise was very much just that. This has been confirmed as that by others. My claim it is false is my claim but I stand behind it. Less than five minutes of a down is spent pitching twenty hands by a good dealer. To get to 25 from 20 by only pitching faster you would have to spend about 15 seconds pitching all 25 hands. And that doesn’t even include the time each down spent correcting and showing the table the flashed card. Thus your clearly stated dichotomy is demonstrably false.

You tried to make a claim. When I show how bad your assumptions were you whine and claim I am dishonest (btw, the correct term would have been disengenuous). Grow up and accept you made a claim which you cannot support or get support for.

I played last night. Dealer with a really fast pitch but was clearly new sat down. He kept making small errors like skipping over people’s actions, missing when it was a kill pot, misfiring his pitch so he would have to move the card, etc.... Point is that the pitch isn’t everything to hand speed. Give me a dealer that takes a few extra seconds to get the cards out but never misses their pitch and runs the game smoothly.

Also for what it’s worth the dealers that had the best pitch had the least spin.

Are you actually this obtuse or just pretending?

All questions come with implied assumptions. Let me demonstrate:

Do you still enjoy having sex with sheep?

Do you still enjoy watching little boys shower?

We're you dropped on your head as a child?

I am not implying anything. I am just asking.

This has already been answered in this thread and should be obvious anyway. Exposed cards on a deal are easily correctable and do not affect the game in any meaningful way. Misreading boards and over-raking pots obviously has a negative effect on the game and might not be correctable.

Agreed, but it still misses the point.

Still missing the point of the comparison. Maybe you weren't pretending...........

I bet you when those theoretical conversations came up about who would you rather sleep with? Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, or Lisa Kudrow, it all went over your head and you kept asking why Jennifer Aniston would sleep with a $1-$3 poker player.

For the record, here are all of the details of the comparison conversation. After a card was exposed on the pitch, a player asked why the dealers didn't deal like they do at high end baccarat games where the players handle the cards (or apparently like some rare European poker games), where the dealer would deal all of the hands right in front of himself and then slide them out to each player. There is almost no chance of exposing a card using this method.

It was explained that using that method was rather slow. So even if you took the slowest, sloppiest dealer pitching cards (one who accidentally exposed one card a down) it would still be preferable to the slow baccarat method to most players. That is where the numbers came from. Take the worst sloppy dealer you know of and compare him to a dealer using the baccarat method. Which would you prefer?

Your obtuseness implies nothing about my maturity.

But it is nice to laugh at. Good luck.

BTW, the correct answer is Jennifer Aniston, even knowing she would never sleep with a $1-$3 poker player.

He’s right though, a good dealer will both deal fast and rarely expose a card. Exposed cards are a telltale sign of a sloppy dealer who will make other mistakes.