All I stated about $12-$15hr and no tips is it won't pay the rent for most folks. And that wage, while it sounds decent compared to the fed min wage, in reality, is about where the fed min wage would be had it stayed with inflation over the last 30 yrs.

If I mixed you up with someone else, saying dealers were only worth 12-15hr I apologize. My comments were intended towards that poster.

just a simple fyi, right now, during wsop in LV. Dealers are averaging FAR LESS than $1 hand and working more. Longer hours, fewer breaks, less $ per hour. While it's an influx of cash for dealers who normally take a lot of eo's during the rest of the year, it's only because they have no shot whatsoever to eo now.

It isnt a bad living. not saying that. But dealers wont get rich either. And making enough to save for a down payment on a home wont be easy in many locales.

It's the only job I know of that has gone way down in pay over the last 30 yrs rather than up. It was pretty gross for the period how well dealers did in some places back in the 80's. And back then they had to toke staff up to 30% of their gross per day.

I wonder, do the same people the worry and whine about how much a dealer makes or should make, complain about their bank CEO's pay? You know, the same bankers that caused your house to devalue 45%-60% in less than a year.

2outs = the bs between hands KILLS most dealers. Even in my room we have very good dealers, and they still kill their bottom line by dicking around between hands. My motto has always been "deal like you're on fire."

To go from 15 hands per half hour down to 13 hands per half hour, you have to spend 18 seconds more per hand.

15 -> 14 requires 9 seconds more per hand.

15 -> 12 requires 30 seconds more per hand.

Don't think I have ever seen a dealer continuously kill 30 seconds between hands. Even 18 seconds is a long time. I can see 1.5 hands per down. Which would be 18 hands a shift (assuming a good rotation).

I think how engaged the players are can greatly determine the number of hph a dealer can get out. Sit and watch a drunk table at 3 am compared to a table of people who are acting quickly and keeping their attention on the game. I'll bet you can get a 10 hand difference sometimes in a game like that.

But I completely agree about dealers and being fast. There are a ton of other things a dealer can do to speed up the game without even factoring in pitch speed. I never really have had blazing pitch speed but I have always been near the top in hph in the room because I do all the other things very well. Counting chips, bringing in bets, prompting action and thinking a couple of moves ahead instead of just reacting to everything will make you deal many more hands. I count stacks faster than almost everyone I have seen can match them.

The bolded is why your data is flawed. You can't use it as a representative example of poker in the US because in the absolutely overwhelming majority of poker rooms dealers keep their own tokes, which provides them with incentive to deal quickly and accurately.

No, that's not true. In 1983 the minimum wage was $3.35/hr. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator, that equates to $7.83/hr in 2013. So there's really not much difference between the minimum wage 30 years ago and today.

I wouldn't call the data flawed since it's just the way they operate here. It's more of a case study of what not to do when managing a poker room. When you chop tokes and remove all of the direct incentive for the dealer to keep the game moving quickly (as has been suggested by banning tipping altogether) ... the game speed suffers and the players see fewer hands.

This. x1000. People asserting that the difference between slow and fast dealers means 7 or 8 hands difference per half do not seem to understand that this is FIFTEEN minutes worth of hands. You'd literally have to spend the entire down wasting 30+ seconds staring into space instead of performing an action that takes 3 seconds. This does not realistically happen. Sweeping in cards or chips slowly, or prompting action, slowly, takes a nanosecond longer than doing it quickly. You do not deal 21 hands in an hour as opposed to 35 because you're not as fast as the best doing these things.

If you witness a 10 hand down, it's an almost guarantee that it was due to incomprehensibly slow play on the part of the players. A fast dealer saving 1.8 seconds a few times per down does not compensate for someone tanking on every decision preflop.

If I took 10 players who never Hollywooded, never stalled, never played with their phones, never wasted time in any fashion, and stuck a completely inexperienced dealer with them, they'd get more hands in an hour than you could at your best.

Bringing in bets quickly or counting stacks in a speedy fashion as opposed to slowly probably saves about two seconds per instance. It does not mean you deal 18 hands instead of 10. The players control this way more than the dealer ever can.

How far off could this estimate possibly be? If someone is in the box for 6 hours, how much do you think they make? Maybe it isn't exactly $180, but it's not going to be far off.

I think he meant 50 years ago. Back when Johnson was president the US was much fairer to lower end workers, the Vietnam war and lobbying by various business groups to exploit lower end workers has had a crippling effect on lower end workers and is now starting to effect white collar workers too.

Not sure what the point of this was. In my post, I said that there is about a 10 hand difference when talking about how the players are moving, not the dealer.

But yeah, 2 seconds per instance adds up to a lot of seconds in the long run.

Maybe, but a flat-hourly wage would make a lot of issues disappear. I still think, if you take a year of full-time dealing, dealers are making more than $1 hand in tokes in typical busy rooms. This is impossible to get an accurate answer on, though.

What issues?

All the contentious issues that cause this thread to continue. It appears that only a minority tip what they think is fair and let the rest go; the majority, it seems, cares what everyone thinks of them and if they're tipping "properly" and so on. This would all be eliminated with a good dealer wage and strict no tipping allowed policy, imo.

Pure unadulterated hogwash.

I've never understood how so many people come to believe dealers make $1 per hand (or more as above states). Or that 8 hrs per day = 8 hrs of dealing.

How many folks really understand what a typical dealing day is often comprised of either?

9am: 6 dealers start their shift. 3 games going. hmmm.. ok.
11am: 12 dealers start their shift, 5-6 games going, 18 dealers on the payroll.
1pm: 14 dealers start their shift, 9-11 games going, 32 dealers in house. Send 3-4 home.

There is little exaggeration in above, and it changes vastly depending on shift, day of week, time of year, which room, etc. Point it to give an idea that it isnt always a gravy train.

How fun is it to be scheduled 5 days a week, be labeled "on-call" with no benefits, avg 26-35 hrs per TWO WEEK PAY PERIOD, for 18-months to 3 yrs before even making "part time" status? You may even be the best dealer in the room. It matters not.

This thread, by definition, *attracts* the small percentage of players that have issues with tipping. So the people that you see here worried about what other people think of them are actually in a minority of the general poker playing population. Eliminating tipping would alleviate some of these people's anxiety about what the 'proper' tipping procedure should be, but they'll probably just worry about something else then.


Eliminating tipping removes the best and most direct way of rewarding good dealers for doing a good job. You can debate all day long what constitutes "good" dealing, but it's a service industry and the customer gets to define what they feel is "good service" on a case by case basis. So it doesn't matter *what* the definition is, just that it's behavior the customers want to encourage.

Obviously the easiest metric is hands dealt per hour. We all want to see as many hands and as much action as possible ("I didn't drive an hour to fold all day", etc). More hands --> More Tokes. Positive re-enforcement. Other concerns like dealer friendliness, attention to the rules, enforcing a clean game without player prompting, etc., are all things that get rolled into the way that most players tip, again re-enforcing desirable behavior.

You could argue that the floor/casino could adjust dealer pay based on performance somehow ... but that's awfully difficult to implement in practice. They don't track the rake on a down by down basis, usually it's by shift, so hands per hour is out. The floor can't watch all of the action at the table all of the time, so all of the service based metrics are out. If anything such a system would *discourage* the dealer from calling the floor for a ruling since they wouldn't want to be seen as having problems. It also opens the door for playing favorites, ie paying the hot dealer more because tits.



The dealers where I play in Detroit chop their tips across the whole casino. So there's very little incentive for them to work any harder than it would take to not get fired. Some of them are great, but some of them are god awful, and overall their average quality and speed is noticeably lower than I've encountered in places where the dealers are working for their own tokes. That's about as close to a case study in what you're suggesting, and it's bad for the game and bad for the players.

Wanna know the difference between a dealer, and a waiter?

While neither are getting tipped on there down time, the waiter is still working.

I think it was in this thread that I read dealers would be happy if the just got $1 hand, but IRL I'm sure that's bs, they want $1 min.

If we were voting on it, I'd say no tipping allowed however, when the pot exceeds 10 big blinds a $1 gratuity is automatically taken.

Fair enough. How much do you make a year dealing at the Bellagio?

I've gone through this several times in this thread. Those auto-shufflers could keep track of hands dealt per down. Even before auto-shufflers, you guys make it seem like dealing is the only job where a boss cannot tell who is a good, bad or stellar employee.

Also, when it really comes down to it, dealing is not a service job. It just isn't. If dealers got $15-$35 based on skill, experience and so forth, you'd see a lot more happy players and dealers, imo.

And playing favorites is definitely more of a problem where tipping is concerned. The guy juicing the floor a green each time he gets his seat is getting the close decisions in a dispute - every time.

Honestly, you're going to have a very hard time convincing anyone that we should get rid of tipping entirely. Tipping itself doesn't cause any problems at the table. It only causes minor issues for players that over think how much they should be tipping, or how much other players should be tipping.

As I've already mentioned in the past couple of posts, my personal experience is that when you reduce the influence of tips on a dealer's bottom line pay (by chopping all tokes across the casino), it hurts the quality of the game. I don't see how removing it entirely would ever be good for the players.

Everything you said was reasonable (except for assessing dealer performance) up until this point. Chopping tokes, while keeping hourly the same, is not similar to increasing hourly pay 7-fold and removing tokes entirely.

Unless you had an easy-to-get-fired policy to go along with it, this would be an utter disaster, as dealers would no longer have an incentive to work hard. This is suggested by the very words of the "light" tipping crowd in this thread, who aggressively insist that they are happy to tip dealers who work hard and get more hands out, and that there is a huge difference between "fast" and "slow" dealers.

And again, if you suddenly instituted an hourly wage as opposed to tipping, all it does is make the rake go up, and you pay anyway. All this would accomplish is making you feel better the few times you drag a 3 buy in pot, because now you don't have to feel social pressure to throw $5 or $10.

90% of hands-dealt-per-down is determined by player action, making this statistic worthless. Find me the best dealer who has ever lived, I'll guarantee you I'll be able to field a 10-handed lineup at his table that guarantees he ends up dealing 23 hands in an hour, no matter how wonderful his pitch/chip counting/chip cutting are.

I think people are underestimating the power of the mighty dollar. If dealers were hourly, they would have less incentive to keep a smooth game going. As it is, they want to maximize the hands per hour. That's what players what...that's what dealers want.


If they were hourly, you know Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.