Quote:
Originally Posted by TheClubber
What is the general rule on tipping for tournaments? When I play at the casino, the dealers rotate among the cash and tournaments, but at the charity games, the tournament dealers seem to be only on tournament tables, which means that for 4-5 hours they can't get tips from the cash games. If you cash in a tourney, what is a good rule of thumb? The last time I won a tournament at the charity venue, the dealer gave me a sour comment because he thought I didn't tip enough. He was a bitter person and a poor dealer, so I'm not too upset, but still would appreciate some guidelines.
This is a subject of considerable debate, and there isn't a
great rule of thumb.
If you want to make an educated decision, first find out how much of the prize pool (if any) was already withheld for the dealers. Generally speaking, the floor person will tell you -- or the dealer will on the sly.
I'm a relatively low tipper on tournament wins (a couple percent of net win with a reasonable minimum value for small cashes), but I don't play a lot of tournaments, so my
personal data point isn't particularly interesting.
To put a couple percentage of net win in perspective, if everyone in my WSOP event had tipped 2% of net, the prize pool was 1.3M, with some money already withheld for dealers. With only 10% of the field cashing, 1.15M of the 1.4M was net win for cashing players. 2% of that is 23k. With the field cut in half by 6 or 7 hours of play - that meant the average player only played 6 or 7 hours (for everyone who played 15, someone played only 1). So with roughly 1000 players in the event, divided by 8 to a table, times at most 8 hours of average play per player, you get roughly 1,000 dealer hours required. 2% net win tipping gives each dealer another $23/hour on top of whatever they got withheld and paid hourly. You can put in much more pessimistic or optimistic numbers, but you'll still likely get at least $20/hour more in tips.
Obviously smaller buy-in tournament pay less this way.
Obviously larger buy-in tournament pay more this way.
Obviously a larger percentage pays more.
Obviously a smaller percentage pays less.
...but smaller buy-in events also don't likely have a thousand dealer hours to pay out, so factor accordingly.