rake != tip. From my perspective you helped contribute to the rake even if you lost. I am not in the WTA perspective. Your buyin contributed to that 3% holdout in the tourney. That is additional money that cannot be won. Really if a buyin was $100 +20, it should be $97 + $3 + $20.

Dealers are under authority and subject to state gaming agencies. They are a part of a broad spectrum in such category. It is illegal to tip the others.

What's the point of tipping in poker? As I understand, the point of tipping is to get better service - if your waitress sucks at diner you tip less, if he is good you tip more and therefore they have motivation to do their job well. How does this logic apply in casino? Unless the dealer is rigging the deck his work quality stays same for everyone, he can't be slow because this would be bad for all players on the table, to big tipper and no tipper.

I understand this is standard habit in American casinos, but is there any logic behind it? And is it standard to tip in -EV table games also, like blackjack? And if it is, are dealers allowed to get pissed off at you if you don't tip when you are high-stakes blackjack player or something?

Wow, until the last post this thread acutally got a legitimate question going for a couple of pages instead of if you don't tip your cheap/ it's my money back and forth which admittedly I have participated in.

To answer that question, yes I would deduct my tip by the 3% if there was a holdback. Also if they charge $5 for extra chips as a dealer toke on a $100 BI, I would also subtract 5% (or whatever the ratio is) from my tip.

Now a new question. I play sporadically (if I am in town) at a specific casino. The rake is 10% up to $5. If the game gets short handed, when they get down to 6 players the max is $3(only if you ask a floor first for a reduced rake). The kicker is they count stacks, not players in the hand. So if someone leaves the table but not for good, they count. If someone is going to the bathroom and missing two hands it's not a big deal. But there is one player who, will leave his chips on the table, play craps for a long time, and sometimes only come back to grab his chips on the way to the window. On Friday we were down to 6 plus this guy. In past trips they would usually lower the rake in this situation. However this time, the floor would not lower the rake even though he knew whose stack was the unattended one. I asked him to lift his chips but he said he couldn't do that until he was gone a half hour. So I left. The reason I completely left instead of just taking a break myself, until either new blood came or the game broke was that I had a RL committment to leave fairly soon anyway.

Another kicker is at this casino, many of the staff are dealers one day and floors the next. This particular floor will be dealing to me soon enough.

Do I stiff him for this? He is a good dealer, nice guy, etc.

Pros for stiffing; IMHO he made a stupid ruling, or at least enforced a stupid rule without considering the specific circumstance when in the past other floors have.

Cons for stiffing; He was just doing his job, he didn't make up the policy, and nothing about his dealing indicates he should be stiffed.

If you want him to rule fair and impartially as a floor, and not bias rulings in favor of people who tip him well as a dealer, then you need to compartmentalize and tip on his dealing merits, not his flooring ones.

Regarding tournaments, and the trend over the last few years to start withholding portions of the buy-ins for "tournament staff"...

How much "staff withholding" is too much?

I think anything over 3% is bad.
Anything over 5% is just gross.

Especially considering that, at most rooms anyway, floors/TDs/dealers still try to hustle/shame you into an additional gratuity when you cash.

one certain room (starts with "V" and rhymes with "completion") has a tourney series starting this week where the staff withholding is as high as 8%!!

Do you mean the dealer addons?

Doesn't really matter. Any tournament where more than 15% of the money that you pay to be in it doesn't go to the prize pool is highway robbery, no matter the method. I would barely tolerate anything over 10%.

Yes, this rule may well mean that all tournaments in your local poker room are highway robbery.

And if there's a dealer addon or some other automatic withholding from the prize pool for the dealers and staff, that's like going to a restaurant and having 17% gratuity automatically included. You obviously don't tip more.

yes, i mean both dealer add-ons, and ones without addons where they just take straight from the buy-in, without any additional tourney chips.

in the tourney series i mentioned above, they are taking up to 18%. (10% house, 8% for dealers of the $150 buy in; which becomes 123 + 15 + 12)

Yeah, I would personally never play in that tournament, though if you're more of a casual player, you're probably okay as long as it doesn't hit 20%.

Then again, that's also probably about as good as you'll get at $150 buy-in.

yeah, its just disappointing because venetian is normally player friendly with their tourneys.

I also edited my first post after you clicked to reply with a restaurant analogy on the tipping.

Honestly, I think that is fairly player friendly. Low buy-in tournaments are going to have higher rake or they're not even worthwhile for the room to run them. Not really any way around it. It all depends on your goals. If you're specifically out to win money, I'd prefer to save up and play in one $450 tourney with better rake instead of 3 $150s, but if you're just out to have fun, don't worry about it unless it's over 20%. Over 20% is just too outrageous.

That's not the way they look at it. From the poker room's point of view, they need to see to it that dealing the tournament doesn't result in a hugely smaller take home wage than dealing cash games. If you visit a room and find the dealers battling with each other to try to force others to deal the tournaments, you know the dealer gratuity for that tourney sucks. If they are fighting with each other because they WANT to deal tournament downs, you know the dealer gratuity is very good. What the room should want to hear is the dealers saying "whatever--I'll do cash, I'll do tourney, whatever you need me to do."

So if you run a $60ish buy-in tournament that averages 50 players and runs for 5 hours and uses 17 man-hours to deal, the dealers are going to want to see like $350 or better in the tip kitty. $350 shared by 50 players is $7 per person. So they'd need to take more than 10%, or do a combination of a $5 "optional" dealer add-on for extra chips that almost everybody takes and rake 3%.

Make that a $300 tournament with exactly the same structure and the dealers still need $7 per person. So now you can take 2.5% from the prize pool.

Make the structure better, so it plays longer, and the percentages are going to have to go up to keep the dealers at ~$20/hr. So if that tournament has a better structure and plays for 8 hours using 30 dealer man-hours, now you need to find $600 to give the dealers. That's 5% of a $300 buy-in, but 20% of the $60 buy-in.

I think you need to consider the amount of the the tournament and the structure of the tournament in evaluating this


So lets take a look at what is going on. First looking at the structures in the Venetian Bounty festival we see that they have eliminated the "optional" dealer addons that used to be part of the process. In the past DSE's the structures typically had a $10 staff addon plus 3% withheld. This 8% actually reflects a reduction in staff withholding under a similar formula. Now lets compare it to other tournaments (since I don;t know there strcutures I am using the database at Allvegaspoker.com for my source of information).

the 8% you are looking at occurs in the smallest buyin event the $150 7PM tournament. Lets compare it to similar size tournaments. Aria has a $125 tournament they withhold $25 for house and staff. Thats a total of 20% for house and staff. Venetian takes 18% for house and staff. At Aria I don't know the breakdown between house and staff .... but does it matter? They take a higher %.

Orleans also has a Friday $125 buy in that has 20% taken out. With a faster structure, faster levels, but some more starting chips)

Wynn also has a $125 buyin with 20% out (I note there is an optional rebuy for $100 and i don;t know if any of that is taken for staff but none is taken for the house). So If there is nothing taken for staff from rebuys then the actual staff percentage would depend on the number of rebuys.

In the upcoming MGM GRAND CHALLENGE SERIES the $125 +$25 buyin tournament (which has a starting stack of 1/2 the Venetian's) also has 4% of the prize pool withheld for staff (I assume they also get a portion of the $25) total take out is $30 so thats 20%

I agree that size/structure are to be taken into account. I am not in favor of automatically tipping beforehand. Where is the incentive for dealers to deal well during the tournament? "Screw it, already got tokes locked up". To me, its a similar situation to rooms that share tokes. Removes the incentive.

Here's my Tipping formula- Plain and simple.

For every $100 in white meat I rake in a pot- I tip a buck.

Ex: If I Rake in a $2,000 pot of which $500 is what I put into, I tip $15 to the dealer

Ex#2: If I rake in a $10,000 pot of which $3500 is what I put into, I tip $65 to the dealer (But usually more as a bonus for driving the bus that allowed me to not only get dealt a monster, someone else dealt a monster, flop big, hold up, etc etc etc)

I realize this goes against long term equity and will send a lot of players heads spinning, but I don't make a living playing poker.

regardless if you play for a living or not anything over $2 is absurd. $65 is insane!!!

i don't tip if i only win the blinds. $1 on every pot under $200. $2 on anything over and sometimes i might tip $2 if it's a little under.

with a shuffler most dealers can get 35+ hands/hr. so $35-$70 per hour dealing cards seems more than fair to me.

Well, it's just my own personal formula. Like I said, I play for recreation. Usually I won't tip unless the pot is at least 60-70 bucks. Maybe that's why the dealers are so friendly to me??

It's been tried your way. Players are notoriously scroogy and the dealers quickly revolt. There's no incentive to even show up if you know it's likely you are going to get stiffed.

For a while we had the "dealer add-on" or "N% of the prize pool" approach leading to a somewhat meager gratuity, with the hope those folks who went deep in the money would add more to it. But more and more you hear the claim "you're crazy if you think I'm tipping EXTRA once you've already forced me to tip!" So that's not reliable.

Which leaves room management with no choice but to rip the tokes out of our hides up front assuming nobody who moneys will be tipping extra.

Many jobs have regularly expected bad days where the work is harder or longer or the pay is lower or it is a holiday but someone has to be there. When employees made a point of missing these bad days they are usually replaced.

And one other thing. that whole 8% doesn't go to the dealers. depending on the casino the floor/management is typically taking somewhere from 25%-33%.

Bottom line if the job isn't paying well its going to be hard to fill and the people who fill it will likely be less dedicated to it.

Revert to the post above, answer accordingly. You can't I presume.

a perfectly rational and acceptable stance, IMO.

I used to tip 3-5% on tourney scores. If you're taking it out beforehand, you get nothing from me. well, maybe the $3 if I cash for $803.

restaurants get the same treatment. i typically tip 20% for good, service, 25% for superb service. but if you're already determining that i must tip 15 or 18%, then this server will have to be "best ever" to get additional money.

Well the post above wasn;t a question. It was a statement. So I can;t really provide you with an answer.

But I'll address that statement. Poker tournaments are not occasional bad days for dealers. Poker tournaments are basically every day for dealers. (obviously this is dependent on where you work).

Since this discussion started with the Venetian series coming up lets look at that.

This year they only planned three deepstacks, usually there are 4. This new series was thrown in at the last minute taking the place of a DSE.

In the previous years the DSE covered 4-5 months time of a year. Thats more than a third of the year. Plus they have 2 daily tournaments everyday the rest of the year. And they have many dealers who are only hired to work during the tournament series. So its not like oh they are having a 10 day tournament maybe they will make a little less these 10 days but thats the price of having the job the rest of the year.


And thats during the busy times. There are also slow times of the year where business is slower on top of this.

The bottom line is that 18% withheld for a $150 tournament is in line with tournaments of that size. If you don't like it ... go play the $150 tournament that takes less ..... and be sure to come here let us know where it is.

go read this thread again, it has the same questions and answers