Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Brecher
I am curious as to what you consider the now-universal 3% withholding for staff to be. I haven't tipped at the end of a tournament (with one exception) since that 3% was instituted.
As to the last point I quoted: some venues in Nevada collect a staff "bonus" or "appreciation" for additional starting chips; the ones with which I'm familiar (Venetian; Reno's Grand Sierra and Atlantis) do it at the cage at time of registration, but it's still a separate charge/fee and not incorporated into the buy-in.
Steve, yes, that 3%, when it's pulled from the pool, is also supposed to be a dealer/staff tip. Since I have no idea what dealers make in tourneys as it is, I have little clue as to what's fair for the forced tips, but before this started happening, I had generally heard that 3% to 5% was reasonable. I give them the benefit of the doubt that they're now basically tipping for us in order to keep a quality stable of dealers for a given venue or series. It wouldn't surprise me if voluntary tipping had gotten worse in recent years now that we have plenty of young pros worried about every ounce of EV and ROI.
At the end of the day, all we can do as players is to see what % of all the fees makes it into the pool and what goes elsewhere and then make up our minds as to whether we think it provides a good opportunity to win some money (including field softness and any other factors). The tip used to be a tricky extra component, but now that they're taking care of that, I completely agree that there's little need to tip extra at the end unless you're in a particularly giving mood.
Obviously the dealers are better taken care of in $10K's that pull 3% as opposed to $350 tournaments that do the same. So it would make sense that the lower buy-in tournaments might need to either pull more from the pool or look for other ways to get money to the dealers. In a perfect world that would all be accounted for in the rake to keep it simple (higher % rakes for cheaper tourneys), but as you note, a lot of venues/series have gotten creative in this regard with a variety of fees. Logical or not, it's how it's done, and I like to play this silly game, so I opt to roll with it.