When dealers pool there tokes they hardly make any money on poker that's why they don't care. It's just how it is same with tournaments they "take it easy" but only hurt themselves. Really annoying. Now I know people will say that the dollars add up and they are right but I only wish instead of people ITT stop tipping, start rewarding good dealers. As for pooled dealers it sucks for both dealer and player.

Pooling is flat out ridiculous

We're always free with other people's money.

And yeah, entitled attitudes like ReidLockhart's. That's why some people insist on not tipping, vocally.

Pooling tips hurts everyone. I agree with fuluck. Over my dead (bank account) body.

So would it be fair to re-word your statement as "Some people don't tip because they want to prove that they can do whatever they want with their own money"?

Is that not what I said? I'm not trying to pick an argument with you. Your posts are very well thought out and I agree with your rationalizations 99% of the time I see you post in a thread.

Yeah, it's purely an emotional thing.

When people are called names, such as 'cheap', they react. It's emotional, but that can make it satisfying.

Fair enough.

Well, that depends.


I got a bonus this year, my collective pooled tips if you will. It was based on the business being successful, not so much on my being successful. [We simply fire the unsuccessful.]

If you're paying your employees a fair wage relative to their skills -- e.g. the good dealers make more than the bad dealers -- then I don't care if they pool tips or not.


I made what I made this year because it's what I'm worth to my company. The "pooled tips" that I got this year didn't make me be a worse employee, knowing I only had to do the minimum to get my share of it.


Reward your employees correctly, and it doesn't matter.


If your business model is to pool tips AND to pay all dealers the same wage no matter how good or bad they are, then you're dumb.

Most casinos pool tips in the Pit and pay all the dealers the same base pay. Do you think they put up with the same amount of variance in dealer performance in the Pit that they seem to put up with in the Poker Room?

I've seen someone not tip on a $600 pot at 1/2, and nothing was said. Hour or so later I won a $500 pot and tipped $1 (I usually tip $1 for every pot over ~$20). I then had some ~50 yr old sitting across from me start to lecture me on tipping and how it was cheap for me to only tip $1 there. People must hate my face or something.

Next time simply respond, "Feel free to add to my tip if you think it's insufficient."

Maybe he thought you played too tight and wanted to tilt you.

So I was sitting at the table last night, completely card dead, surrounded by calling stations , and had an interesting thought about tipping.

The idea is to tip the dealer every X hands dealt, win or lose, regardless of pot sizes. The dealer doesn't really have any influence on if I win or lose a given hand, or on the size of the pots that I pull in. But they can directly influence how fast the game moves along. So tipping based on number of hands rewards a good dealer (faster) more than a bad dealer, without the variance of hand results.

I'm not sure what X should be though ... 10 seems a little high, 8 maybe.


Has anyone tried a method similar to this? Thoughts?

I was in the room when this happend. why this guy made it a big deal is beyond me as to why I had to hear about it when I was 5 tables away.

At least you gave a standard tip. The guy who won the 600 could have easily forgot about it. It happens.

This actually seems like a good idea. Toss the dealer $2 every time it's your BB, assuming a full table. A decent player can win 2 pots per orbit and assumes you tip $1 per hand won. Only problems are if something weird requiring a floor decision eats away at time, or if the dealer needs a new setup. These could penalize a good dealer.

Being a rec player, I'd probably stick to tipping every pot I pull and increase based on pot size, but I'm not concerned about win-rate, etc.

If you're suggesting that poker room management are a bunch of slackers who should prune their bad dealers but don't, then I have no argument.


The pit wouldn't deal with a Blackjack dealer who didn't do >60 decisions per hour.

Somehow ended up in this thread after being confused on why there is a "brick and mortar" and a "mortar and brick" subsection, so I clicked on each to see what difference was and ended up clicking this thread because of view count and the fact that I have played a lot of live poker in my day and my tipping policy has changed dramatically over the years.

The first thing I learned from this thread is that the B/M section has to have the highest iq per reg poster %. So many well thought out novel length pots with perfect punctuation and huge fancy words in the 30 pages of this thread that it actually hurts my intellectual ego because I consider myself of above avg intelligence. But with the amount of good content in this thread all over tipping, you would think this it was being debated by a bunch of members of MENSA .

Secondly, The Palimax has been owning this thread really hard in the last few pages, and as much as I hate to say it its true with regards to dealers.
Ive seen dealers take so much **** from players time after time and have on numerous occasion stood up for the dealers, its just part of the job. Deal with it.

My tipping background/policy goes like this. I started playing live poker when I was sneaking into my local card room at 17 to play 3/6 hold em. Obviously didn't even know it was the norm, and took a few sessions to catch on to what was going on. I grinded live hold em at the same card room for probably 3-6 days a week for 3-4 years, starting at $3/6 and eventually moving up to 15/30 which was their big game. It was a card room of only like 7 tables and a smaller pool of dealers, so playing the amount of hours I got to know them all and saw them almost daily. At the time I really wanted to be what I would call a "known reg" I guess, where all the dealers and floors liked me and knew me. So for years I was tipping anywhere from $2-8 per hand all while playing small-mid stakes limit holdem, something that is obviously going to kill your winrate.

I finally found online poker and started to succeed at it when I was 22 and for like three years I didn't play live at all minus summers at wsop. After Black Friday I decided to start going back to the card room I had originally started playing at to play $30/60 a few days a month when I wasn't out of town/country. Even though it had been like three years since I had been there, it was literally all the same faces dealing. Everybody was obviously very cordial at the beginning because I had always been a very good tipper, but it was funny how things changed when I didn't tip so liberally. While playing online and learning about win rates and never having to tip, it made me realize that I had just been naive about tipping before and was cutting into my winnings pretty substantially. Now I was only tipping $1 per hand and the occasional 2-3 for big pots, good service etc.. Some of the dealers that used to always be so friendly, were now being cold and rude because I guess they were expecting more. Its almost all about the $ in the service industry, which if fine, but when the level of service/treatment is greatly impacted by how big of a tipper you are its crossing the line.

I now play almost exclusively live $10/20 and 25/50, and usually tip $1-3 on pots <5k and anywhere from 3-25 on >5k. I've never tipped more than $25 even on puts 30-40k, does that make me cheap?

Here are the few basic things that I am looking for in a dealer and will influence my level of generosity.

1.DO NOT INITIATE CONVERSATION!!!!
Over the years this has become by far my biggest pet peeve, and the thing that slows the game down the most and causes the most errors. Its ok to greet the table with a "How is everyone today?," but when a dealer starts making small talk with the players its literally the nut low. I would say <5% of the dealers are skilled enough that they can both make small talk and keep the game going with a good pace and no mistakes. Normally it just ends up with the dealer getting distracted and loosing the action, burning and turning too quickly etc..

2. Keep the speed of play reasonable
Some tables, especially bigger NL games are going to be a bit slower with lots of people going into the tank, but as a dealer be aware of when someone is thinking about a decision and when someone just clearly does not know that the action is on them.

I want to make a quick note. While I do believe that customer service staff are paid to eat crap and smile -- it doesn't mean that I believe we should feed them as much crap as possible.

I played a tournament at a place with electronic tables. There is a tournament director that deals with adding late players, moving players to even tables, and breaking tables.

Should this guy get a tip?

I'm not sure but I saw what looked like a player who cashed in the tourny tip the td which made me think about it.

Wow, this thread is something else. I never imagined that this much thought went into determining tip amounts. I play at casinos, but nowhere close to full-time. I believe I'm a zombie tipper, unless I stack someone, then I usually start slinging red chips. Holla.

For 99% of the cases (ie tipping per pot), very little thought goes into it.

Tournaments and BBJs are separate cases that apply to relatively few players, but cases that do not have well defined norms, despite the claim of some.

When the question is to tip $1 or $3, most people go by their habits.

When the question is about hundreds or thousands of dollars, people stop and think and many come here to get some starting point to base their future decisions.

There is a dealer at my local casino who is a degenerate who bets on sports and loses very often, should that change how I tip him or should I just keep it standard? He isn't doing anything wrong dealer-wise but I feel like I am contributing to his gambling problem and throwing my money away

Tip based on his performance as a dealer. Anything else is irrelevant.

Agreed. What he does with the money afterward is not our concern.

As a custom in our casino, we leave a buck or two for the chip runner for when they do our fills. I used to be a chip runner so I always leave a buck. I had a guy give me attitude because I used "his" tip to give to the chip runner.