UK News

A Raw Deal?
My poker background has at its foundation learning to deal. I was only allowed to play in my parents' weekly home game after fulfilling two criteria - being able and willing to stake myself and bow out graciously when I hit the felt (it was just a 10p-20p limit game, but £20 is a lot to a kid), and being able and willing to deal. That included shuffling quickly and efficiently, and being able to deal all games - stud, flop games and, more often than not, games made up on the spot, with multiple flops or strange layouts with minimal mistakes for a crowd of enthusiastic amateurs and the odd ex-pro. No one likes being left out of what grown-ups seem to be having lots of fun doing, and I was no exception. I duly memorised the rules to every game I could find and took my turn losing my shoes to my own mother, among others.

All this practise pre-university meant that when I came out and needed to get a part-time job, I was hired as a dealer at the Gutshot Club in London. There, under the watchful eye of Roy Houghton, I added the new and (briefly) exciting skills of being able to calculate percentages of pots quickly, and defuse minor ruling 'situations.' After a year of this it was round to a different sort of observational job, watching and reporting on poker hands, even playing occasionally - but every now and then jobs come up which involve actually sitting at the centre of a table again (not the five seat!). Sometimes I take them, the most recent being a job dealing cash at the new PokerStars European Poker Tour Prague event in December.

There is something about Mr. Houghton which makes me almost unable to refuse to join a team of dealers under his gruffly amiable leadership, and although the terms weren't on the surface enticing (one pays one's own ticket; one works for tips only for five days) I found myself up at 8 a.m., on a plane to the Czech Republic at 2 p.m., sat behind a table dealing no-limit hold'em played for koruny (the local currency) at 7 p.m., and passing out in my hotel at around 5 a.m. the day it started. This trend was to continue - for anyone who may have been playing in these cash games, which started at midday and went on until the sun was up, the same faces were going to be seen again and again, becoming progressively more haggard until the final hands were announced. The scale of interest in the event itself, and therefore the side action provided, was huge - possibly larger than the venue had been expecting, and certainly too much for their own staff to comfortably cover. For reasons unknown to us, Thomas Kremser and his excellent EPT staff weren't dealing on the cash side (literally - the large room was divided in two) and so UK dealers were arranged to handle it.

By day two, the rota, which had been devised to minimise the six-hour turnarounds sometimes necessitated by the number of staff available, was only still holding because dealers, who considered sleep a luxury trumped by the opportunity to make more money, came in early. "What's the problem?" I hear you ask, "The more hours you work, the more you earn, and it's not going to kill you to work hard for a week." There are two points to be made about this. Firstly, dealers who work solely for tips rely on players giving up chips. Not money, chips. I have seen players who insist gallantly on buying dinner for all their friends arguing over a minimum denomination chip in a split-pot. Players and dealers (most of whom have played at some point) both know that tipping is optional. And so it should be. I have never asked to be tipped, or told someone else that they should tip. Some dealers consider it a right to be tipped whatever happens - small pots, big pots, on a sliding scale depending on how much is won in a hand. While this is prevalent in the U.S., in Europe and the UK (where it is illegal) tipping the dealer isn't an automatic thought to a player who has just won a pot. At the EPT especially, a lot of young, internet-trained players clearly didn't even think about it.

The argument against tipping (it does, in the long run, detract from one's own profit) holds less well when dealers aren't being paid a wage. If you want to play the most efficient, speedy, cheaply-raked games, you need to turn on your computer, not play live cash. Period. Having decided to eschew the Wi-Fi in the lobby, players coming to the EPT cash area presumably wanted to play as efficient a game as possible, and that is the sum of the dealers' job. As one dealer in America replied in response to one irritatingly superstitious player asserting that the dealer was unlucky for them, "I don't write the letters, I just deliver the mail."

The point is that unless you self-deal (and everyone at the table can shuffle - another thing that is becoming a rarity) there is no option but to have another person do it for you. In the case of our team, we weren't contracted as such, and being unpaid, could have collectively walked out (which came close on the first night when it became apparent that we had no shirts, no food, and were expected to start straight away). Players there were effectively paying for a service. It is a strange sort of service, where your tips go to someone who might facilitate you losing lots of money, and can only manage a fraction of the hands per hour available online, but a service it is.

The second point is that the probability of a dealer making a (potentially costly) mistake rises with time spent on the tables without a break. The same players making floor manager Mike Middlemiss' ears ring with their clamours for more tables to be opened were just as eager to complain when a dealer working his 14th hour accidentally mucked his hand, or was a little slow calculating the pot in Omaha. It's not the players' responsibility to maintain good working conditions for the staff where they're playing (and I've seen worse, actually) but given the situation, I am eternally surprised by the lack of empathy displayed by people sitting right across from you, often for hours at a time. One player, after winning several hands, tipping only once, minimally, received an apparently unsatisfactory salad from a waiter. "This place is so stingy," he said.

Enough of the downside of dealing, although I could continue with stories of being cursed in multiple languages, ordered to shuffle better (for the record, seven straight riffles or a couple fewer and a good wash is as close to random as you're going to get a deck) or told the size of the pot incorrectly by backseat dealers. But for a poker enthusiast trying to earn a bit of money or trying to gain vicarious experience, it's a pretty good job. I found that after card manipulation became automatic, there was plenty of 'dwell time' in which to study players, good and bad. In Prague I saw some players own their tables,
making excellent decisions for hours at a time, as well as one player misread his Omaha hand in a £3,600 pot, believing three from his hand made a full house.

Because of your objectivity when dealing, reading the players you are pushing chips to and from is somehow easier, and dealing is an excellent introduction to players who aren't familiar with the live game in starting to read players themselves, even though I hold the opinion that bet size and frequency is the most important type of information gathering. The magic of sitting in the dealer's chair, however, seems to evaporate when I am actually making decisions myself sitting in another. But there's something strangely gratifying about putting two people on hands, which at showdown turn out to be correct - even when there's no value for you in it, as you aren't allowed to play and are unlikely to see the players again.

Dealing long hours again after two years' break was good for me in several ways. It reminded me how lucky I am to be able to write about the game and press buttons on my computer most of the time, how hard a lot of dealers work, and how irrationally people can behave when their money is in the middle of a table. Remaining polite, calm, speedy, refraining from correcting pieces of horrible maths offered by others, are all good tests of how calm and detached you can be in a sometimes tense environment. I don't know exactly how, but that's got to benefit a poker player. After a particularly nasty outdraw, I got an earful of abuse from the losing player. He calmed down, and after a couple of minutes apologised, saying, "I'm sorry. You just don't know what it's like to be outdrawn." "No Sir, it's quite alright." He tipped me CZK100 (£3).

Jen Mason is a part of www.blondepoker.com. She is responsible for its live tournament coverage in the UK and abroad.