MotorCity Mafia

Several hours after the quad 8s fiasco the other night, I walk outside for a smoke.

Standing there alone was the dealer from that hand. She is a short, sweet Asian woman.

Two things were odd about this. First, she was alone. The smoking patio ALWAYS has several people there.

Second, I have never seen casino staff in this area. Plus, she does not smoke.

I say hello to her. She was waiting for me.

“Sammy, pros can’t play with these amateurs,” she begins.

“What makes you think I am a pro?” I ask out of curiosity.

“I know a pro when I see one. I know two things. One, you are the best Hold ‘Em player I have seen. Two, no matter how great you play, no one can beat the luck of these amateurs.”

She is right - at least about the beating luck part.

“That donkey should not have been in the hand with you after the flop. I had to do my job and retrieve his cards. I did not want to, but I saw his hand,” she says.

Fair enough.

Now, many dealers play poker. Most are marginal players. A few pros were dealers at one time. I have not met a pro that became a dealer.

Until now.

As it turns out, this dealer used to play professionally.

She tells me a story about how her bankroll went from $20,000 to $80,000 from January to August one year. Then, from September to December, it went from $80,000 to minus $120,000.

This dealer continues the story by telling me she did not play with these amateurs, but in private clubs - illegal games chock full of pro-level players.

As I am about to ask about these games since I would rather play with skilled players, she gives me a bit of advice.

“Playing for a living is stressful and the bad beats are unavoidable. If I were you, find another way to make money. Professional players have no life. They are always at the table. And when they are not, they are in a bad mood the next day from tough beats.”

She is right.

Great insights and great advice.

My problem is I have the rare gift of accurate reads and surgically-precise decisions.

My bigger problem is finding a way, if there is one, to overcome the donkey luck factor.

As I have said before, I have recently experienced a high number of losses that were 1000-to-1 longshots.

Her advice came at a good time. I gratefully took it to heart.

You can tell how a person plays cards by the way they tip (or don’t tip) the dealers.

Players in the casino for the first time generally do not tip the dealers at all.

Drunks and donkeys tend to tip too much.

Grinders and rounders tend to tip the right amount.

So, the question is how much to tip and why.

The first thing I do when I am in a poker room for the first time is find out their rules and procedures. I ask floor management a bunch of questions. I want to know what goes and what does not.

I find out if the dealers pool their tips or keep the tokes they earn themselves.

Most card rooms force the dealers to pool tips.

I am bit more stingy in the pooled version. This is because some dealers are better than others.

And some are just plain awful.

A competent dealer can deal at least 30 hands an hour with no misdeals, is friendly, and has complete control over the action at the table.

My guideline for tipping competent dealers is simple: the tip amount is equal to the small blind.

If the dealer is better than competent and keeps their own tips, then I will tip an amount equal to the big blind. This is the exception.

In a $1-$2 game at 30 hands an hour, the dealer is making $30 an hour in tips, or over 3X their base salary. That is fair.

Plus, if you are playing for money and not the thrill of victory, you are already losing $5 a pot to the rake and bad beat jackpot. It is hard enough to beat the rake let alone bleed off chips to excessive tipping.

Keep the tips limited to the small blind amount - big blind max.

If you are a regular player at a poker room, and want to do more, then do what I do: Give the dealer a Christmas card with a cash gift at the end of the year (assuming the year was profitable).

Casinos have a universal rule against string bets in cash games. A string bet happens under two conditions.

The most frequent version is when someone does not announce raise or the bet amount, but silently pushes chips in with two or more motions.

When this happens, either the first stack of chips or a minimum bet is all that gets in the pot.

The other style of string bet is when someone says “I see your bet and raise you”. You hear this in the movies and see it in home games all the time.

Hell, I saw it twice within 10 minutes at the casino recently. Here is what happened:

Some ex-military guy says “I call your bet and raise you $100.” I was not in the hand and the dealer let it go. After the hand, I told the dealer that was a verbal string bet. He agreed in retrospect.

Two hands later we have a new dealer. I flop quad 4s with one person behind me. He is also an ex-military guy. Long story short, we get down to the river and my opponent made his hand: nut flush.

I bet and he says “I call your bet and raise you all-in.”

Before I could say “call”, the dealer tells him it was a string bet.

That cost me a bunch of money.

In a casino cash game, poker players need to speak before they act physically. The only words to be spoken are “call”, “raise”, and “fold”. If you are betting or raising, declare the amount before acting.