Well said. Also, there's a decent chance that the guy with 5 buy-ins in front of him has 3, 4, 5, or 10 buy-ins in the game already. Unless he showed up to the table in the present down, the dealer has no way of knowing his aggregate buy-in.

QFT. I once sat down at my regular room to a 1/2 table. I quickly asked for a transfer. It broke my "rule of two". If I see two people at my 1/2 table I consider good players (not great, just good), unless there is a massive fish/donator I will transfer). I moved to another table that had 3 regulars who are ridiculously weak tight and another regular who is a passive calling station donator.

Later, I was taking a break and a dealer I was friendly with came up to talk. He had been at the first table I was at before transfer and later dealt to my table.

Him: "Um, you were doing good there huh? I can't believe you moved from that first table to that one?"

Me: ????

Him: Well, there's 4 pretty good players there (points to the 3 weak tight guys who are an open book to me and the 4th guy who is just astoundingly passively bad).

Me: I respectfully disagree

I thought this guy was a pretty sharp dealer but the fact that he thought all 4 of these guys were good told me:

a: He doesn't know much about PLAYING poker.
b: He's extremely unobservant or (more likely) he sees so many hands that the "ordinary" ones aren't noticed. Its observation bias. Dealers notice big pots, I think, because they don't happen as often. Weak tight regulars go up against someone who pays off their set when they have AA and passive calling stations occassionally have their draws come home and win a big one. Dealers don't notice all the small/medium pots these guys lose to the really good players.

I agree that most people suck at poker. Dealers are people, so most dealers suck at poker. There are many reasons why the dealers you see playing suck even more than the average person, but that's a separate discussion.

We only see the table 30 minutes at a time, and we have a lot more to do than study everyone at the table. I don't even look at the board unless there's a showdown, and usually only after somebody tables a hand. You try sitting at a table and make sure everybody gets the proper cards, everybody acts in turn, everybody has the proper bets out, everybody gets their questions about everything and anything answered, everybody gets the proper chips, those with chips coming pay what they owe, the rack balances, the rake gets collected, the cocktail waitress gets called, etc etc etc...

Do that on one table for 30 minutes and then get up for three or more hours and do the same at half a dozen other tables before going back. Then tell me how good you are at assessing the table.

(edit to add: even with all that, I still have a pretty good idea of who's good and who's not... the fish make themselves known right away, but sometimes it can take months before you see enough of a player to know if he's truly good or not)

I love poker so I would never consider it a waste of time playing.

If you could pick one day to be able to play poker then Saturday would be it.

The "long run" is meaningless in this discussion. If you are a good player you will win a lot more per hour playing only for a few hours on Saturdays than you would if you played 40-50 hrs/week. If you are a bad player you will lose a lot less per hour playing for a few hours on Saturdays than you would otherwise.

The only thing you won't be able to do is know what your winrate would be if you played full time.

Make every decision to optimize your long term EV and dont worry if you never get there. Nobody gets there, it is a theoretical idea only.

I did basically mention all of these reasons and explain that this is why dealers are in general very bad at knowing who the best players are...it wasnt some shot at the moral fiber of dealers everywhere.

+1

No what we competent players do is observe their play and get info from their play.

Yeah and the odd thing is that I agree with you, so I don't know WTF I was rambling about.

I just got off a long shift, I'm tired, my fingers have diarrhea.

People with huge stacks are usually LAGs....they are probably not particularly good players, but you should start with the assumption about all players in a low stakes game. I usually think someone with a huge stack has about the same probability of being good as someone with a slightly larger than average stack. Note that bad, inexperienced players (as opposed to degenerate gamboooler) will usually be intimidated by winning a lot and get up from the table before their can acquire a huge stack.

Most indicative of skill is that people who buy-in seriously short (e.g. $100 in a 1/2 NL game) are almost always terrible. They are buying in short because they don't expect to win and want to limit their losses. I have never seen a person play a conscientious, intelligent "short stack strategy" at a 1/2 NL table. Of course, the downside of playing a table where everyone buys in short is that it limits the amount of money you can win on a given hand, and most people who buy in short won't be at the table very long.

yeah, I wasn't taking a shot at dealers' either. My point was that them being very busy observing very different things and getting selection bias on who wins pots means they really aren't very qualified to note the good players.

FWIW, I've discussed this with a couple of guys I think are very good players and they both agreed with me.

FWIW......

Tom McEvoy once told me that his credo for poker, he has always lived by & is a FIRM believer in, is that you should always assume an unknown player plays well. Give that unknown player some respect.



On the other side of the coin is 2+2 Titan, Mason Malmuth.......



"Assume that unknown players play badly.

When I first began to play poker, I was advised to assume that my opponents played well until they proved otherwise. The logic behind such thinking is that this way you would tend to be conservative & perhaps avoid some costly mistakes. I am now convinced the opposite is true."



********************


From my own experience, I believe Mr Malmuth to be correct.


Best Wishes

Howard

Is it just me, or are we now miles away from the original question in the original post?

You must be new here (obv. not).

I would agree with other posters and couldn't say it better. Saturday is a great day to play. Myself, I rarely play any other time than Friday nite, and when I do, I notice a big difference in the games.

Saturday's alright for fighting (as the song goes). Saturday's alright for poker.


May be the BEST time to play poker. Good luck to OP!


All the best,

HoJo

And they say that dealers don't know poker!