Dealers create their own tips

Pay close attention the next time you play live poker at the casino.

I sit in the game and take notes. Not just the notes you think about,
on player's style and tells.

I take my notes on the dealer too, and the hands in question. The lack
of attention paid to the dealer and the fact that players don't
really pay too close attention to what they actually won in a pot. The
house might watch the cards as the dealer handles them, and how he
handles the players as the action goes around the table, but rarely
will any attention be paid to anything else the dealer does.

After 30 or 40 minutes, I stand up and say, "Stop the action".
Everyone looks at me and thinks "this guy is nuts". I say to the
dealer "don't touch anything". Naturally the floor person is
called immediately to toss this nut (me) out.

The floor person arrives to find out what the problem is and the dealer
says, "He's interrupting the game". Floor person sees me standing
and before he can respond I say "count the tray". Huh? Count the
chip tray.

For those of you that don't know, the dealer tray of chips is there
for making change for larger chips that enter the game and depending on
the size of the stakes the tray will have $200.00, $500.00, or more in
it depending, again, on the size of the game. The tray also has dollar
chips, no matter how big the stakes are so that the dealer can make
change to collect the rake. You've all seen this done. The dealer
takes a five or ten dollar chip from the pot and makes change from the
tray so that he can pull the rake from the pot. Poker is the only game
in the casino where the dealer tray never fluctuates. Nothing is ever
paid out of the tray and nothing is ever added to the tray during the
course of the game. There's no need for the house to watch the tray
constantly as they would in blackjack to make sure the dealer isn't
over paying players from the tray. In the poker room they come around
and count the tray every couple of hours just to make sure the tray is
correctly at the level it should be.

So the floor man counts the tray and looks bewildered. I say
"$405.00", and the dealer says, "what did you do?" Now the
players are bewildered as well. They have no clue about whets going on
and most don't really have a clue about the mechanics of a poker game
anyway.

I pull my notes and tell the floor man the following.

Player in seat 2 won a $260.00 pot with KK.
Player in seat 6 won a $240.00 pot with an 8 high straight.
Player in seat 2 then won another pot of $220.00 with a king high
flush.
Player in seat 9 won a $160.00 pot with ace high.
Player in seat 5 just won the last pot of $280.00 with QQ against TT.

In each one of these hands the dealer pulled a chip from the pot to
make change for the rake and returned the change to the pot, $1.00
short. And although there is dollar chips in the pot, the dealer
routinely makes change for the rake so that the dollar chips don't
leave the game, so that the players continually have dollar chips to
post the $2.00/4.00 blinds.

The dealer gets his usual dollar tip each hand and stacks them next to
the chip tray. When the stack gets to five he puts the five
"dollar" chips in the tray and pulls a five-dollar chip from the
tray so that his tips don't eat up the dollar chips. This slick
willie was palming the extra five dollars that he was stealing from
pots and taking it from the tray when he took his five from the tray
from legitimate tips.

The floor man distributed the five chips to the players that won those
hands and sent slick willie on an early break. Slick was back dealing
and hour later.

Pay attention to everything when playing poker.

By the way, this was Ameristar in St. Louis and the tips are dropped in
a tip box and shared so I would think that this is routine for all the
poker dealers there. They double their tips, as a team, along with the
floor man who made no big deal of it.

I've seen it at Harrah's, and I saw it happening on the President
when I used to play there.