lol you’re going to trigger mason malmouth with this take. he thinks dealers should be completely silent robots who never talk. personally I’m somewhat mixed on this. some people can pull it off, but most can’t.

Is there some sort of NVG 'hot take of the year' award ceremony that I've not been aware of or something?

I used to enjoy the "dealertainers" at the Imperial Palace.

https://youtu.be/Lb0J0TWcqQA

The last time I told a cock tale at the poker table I was booted for the night. YMMV.

Just spent 12 days in Vegas playing and the number of drunk people I saw at the tables was 0.
I was disappointed.
Granted I never played past midnight, but still.
I love to ride a good buzz for hours at the table but not push it too much.

we should ban the phrase "drunk tourists" from this site since there are almost ZERO of them

Would be more fun if there were.
The only drunk I can remember was from a trip 3 years ago and he was up huge.
He was beyond wasted.

The "drunk tourist" is a myth.

If I were a dealer I'd get fired or my ass kicked immediately.
I'd be so bored I'd start doing commentary and then it would bleed into smack talk

"Dude, this guy has cobwebs on this chips and hasnt raised in two hours and you called? "

"The suckout master going for his third one of the session, must be frustrating for you all"

"Seriously? We're 5 ways and NO ONE bets this flop?"

"your third buy in, maybe stop playing that K10 offsuit as the 4th caller for $40 preflop this is a 1-3 table you know, Wudyasay?"

"wow, you folded? Were your cards blank? You've never folded anything before"

Too funny. Maybe not to that extreme but I have witnessed dealers providing commentary on peoples play hundreds of times.

"**** you i wont do what you tell me" -Elizabeth5799

robots like you are killing the game. either bring some personality or stay home and play online. so sick of feeling like a weird moter****er for being a chatterbox

I had a similar idea to the OP. If the dealers took a shot of liquor prior to their shift I think they would be a lot more engaging with players.

The amount of mistakes and slowing down of the game would be pretty ridiculous.

It wouldn't be a fair task to ask dealers to be very good at dealing *and* also somehow talking and being amusing.

Yet everyone loves Phil Ivey despite the fact that he's spoken 7 words at a table in 25 years.

its funny when there's one guy who's being all silent and mysterious surrounded by a table of chatterboxes. Phil ivey already got the part, so the rest better be talking. A table filled with phil ivey type silence is horrible

The entitlement nowadays is amazing. Everyone better always entertain us. It's their fault if we are bored. Its definitely not us not being able to be satisfied without someone else doing the entertainment work for us.

A wsop table behind me had to go to the eye in the sky because the dealer had mucked the board after significant action on the flop and no ability for players to agree on what the cards were. They missed a solid 20 mins of a level as a result, and shocker the camera was inconclusive so they wound up with a brand new flop.

But yeah let’s add non-poker-related tasks to dealers’ plates.

It doesn't require top talent to gossip with the players while dealing low stakes NLHE.

But that kind a dealer in any game where you get dealt more than 2 cards is a catastrophe.

Half the dealers out there take it as a person affront when I inform them I haven't acted and ask what I did that they interpreted as a check. And you want to give them more responsibility?

Poker aside not everyone wants to have a convo with complete strangers

Theirs an old saying.something like a man should be able to sit in a room alone with his thoughts for 30 minutes. I think a lot of people in this thread would lose their minds if they were forced to do that

they would call it boring and call for a minimum joke requirement in order to sit at the table

The amount of entitlement and trolling in this thread is at an optimum level.

I have played in games that were fun 1/3 or 5/5 where everyone has a chat and has a laugh including the dealer. I have played in Asian 40knl games where if you make a joke and a triad boss doesn’t laugh you might end up losing a finger.


I had a story from a while back. There was an Asian boss let’s call him Mr Zhao. He was sitting at a 5/5 game in a local casino around 10 years ago. Iced out diamonds on his wrist and he couldn’t speak any English.
Actually all he could say is “no English”. He used a translator app to say anything. Anyway he deliberately lost a hand to a young rec. I looked as his reaction as he paid off the young kid. The young kid said haha old Chinese whale. I pulled out my translator app and I said to him “why did you pay him off sir, I knew you that you knew you weren’t good here”. His reply was “ beggars come in all forms, I believe if I pay or help the beggars then I will win good fortunes at baccarat, I just won 300,000 playing before so I thought I would continue the good fortune and pay the beggers”

I laughed , he laughed. 2 years later I was playing in Macau and he remembered me. Staked me to play games in Macau and In other various casinos.

He was a VIP and actually banned from the country I was playing in. The reason he was allowed to go to the casino because the casino itself even though located in the country he was banned from is its only jurisdiction with its own rules. He had to fly by helicopter and strictly stay at the casino or he would be arrested and deported.

There are times to laugh and joke and there are times when your laughing and joking gives off tells to other players, wether that’s information regarding a hand or having your fingers cut off if you say something that offends them .

He introduced me to many games where you couldn’t say a word as it were business games / money laundering and then games where other vips would call me “Gweilo” which means “white devil” in English.

Fun times

For regular casino poker, this is absolute nonsense.

For TV poker, it's a great idea. The shows always have the dealer in a headset and never emphasize the role. A poker stream with a mic'd up comedian as dealer could be a hit. Norm McDonald would have been the best if he was still alive.

Those of us who grew up playing dealer's choice home games may recall how much interest a funny dealer can add to the game.

They may not come drunk but if op has their was they'll leave drunk

Alright, time for an old man to yell at clouds.

I've been doing live Vegas poker for almost 20 years now. The games used to be a lot more social, fun, drunk, chatty, all that. Not all of them, but if you played during the evenings, maybe 60-70% were fun/entertaining to play at.

Then online got banned, and all of those robots who were 40-tabling who have absolutely no personality whose only goal is to silently crush you for the maximum at poker were displaced and a lot of them ended up coming to Vegas. Fun tables dropped off like a ****ing rock. Those guys know how to kill the mood. Within a year or two you'd have 3-7 of these silent online robots at your table and you just had this boring table where any recs who sat down had no fun and got absolutely crushed. In the old live poker world, you'd try to make a guy go home broke but feeling like he had bad luck or at least he had a good time.

Pre-ban live pros mostly knew that part of the job was making an entertaining game for the people you want to come lose their money to you. They'd mostly at least try to keep things fun and not make people feel bad about their decision to come lose money at a poker table. The new silent robot breed, though, has no objectives but to destroy. They were pulling some Ivan Drago IF HE DIES, HE DIES ****. They turned the game boring, they turned the game too hard, they destroyed the recs and didn't have the social skills to make them feel like they had a fun time doing it, and they drove out most of the players you want at the games so most of what's left is just the robots.

They also made it obvious they were being predatory and the recs were the prey. What little conversation there was often revolved around advanced strategy concepts that recs aren't even familiar with, which is so ****ing stupid. You're sending up signals that scream "you don't belong here" to exactly the person you want at your table. And you'd get predator behavior like if a rec was juicy enough to keep a game going to 4am, and then he decided to leave, suddenly the game would ****ing instantly end and all the robots would basically race the dude to the cashier, pretty much telling him "hey, we were here for you, you're awful, and we're predators, and now that we got all that we could for you we aren't even going to pretend it wasn't all about fleecing you by giving you a few minutes to cash out before we leave"

The dealers don't need to be entertaining, the players do. All you online robots who put all your skills into GTO and zero into social skills or fun are what made the game this way.

This.