Crushing Live Poker With Twitter

January 4 — Tipping is a necessary part of being a professional player

Tipping in poker, whether it is to the dealers, floormen, cocktail waitresses, or food servers is one of the most widely-debated topics amongst players that play poker for profit. Obviously if you tip a lot, it can drastically effect your bottom line. However, if you tip too little you will be looked at as a scoundrel and may not receive the best rulings or have ease and mobility in changing tables.

People often ask me my position on tipping dealers, specifically. They think that there may not be a reason to tip dealers because the dealer has to do the same job no matter what the circumstance and that tipping would not make them perform any better or worse. Even if this assertion is correct, dealing is part of a service industry just like the wait staff at a restaurant is. Going in, as the customer, you know that these people make the majority of their money from tips, as they are only paid a minimum wage and in some states a “tipping” minimum wage hourly can be a lot less than the regular minimum wage.

However, those that play for profit definitely have to pay close attention to their bottom line. In reality you cannot afford to tip $25 or $50 every time you win a large pot like some recreational players. Also, when you are playing a game with a flat drop like the games in California, even tipping $1 in a very small pot can also considerably affect your winrate.

Recently I recorded a podcast on my training site, CrushLivePoker.com, with regards to my approach to tipping. Ninety percet of the time I am playing in a $5-$10, $500-$1,500 buy-in game where the drop is $5+$1+1 on the river. In pots of under $100, I tip one dollar 20-25 percent of the time. In pots over $100, I always tip at least one dollar. Then, as the pot size goes up, I may tip two dollars for pots more than $500 up to a cap of five dollars for something more than $5,000. This is the way that I have always approached tipping and, although there is not a right or wrong answer, I fully acknowledge that a dealer has not done any less work in the smaller pots or more in the larger ones.

The main point that I made in the podcast, however, is that even if I might tip less than the average player (remember most do not play for profit) I try to make this up through kindness and treating the dealers nicely, never being abusive. One of the dumbest things that I see at the poker table day in and day out are those players that swear, berate, curse, and throw things at the dealer because of a bad beat. It really is one of the most illogical things that one can do and you will never ever see me take out my frustration of “unluckiness” on a dealer. In fact, the only times that I ever get irritated with a dealer is when they are not controlling the game properly or they put the onus on a player to call something out that some other player is doing that clearly breaks the rules. That puts the player who may be following the rules in a weird spot because he is made out to be the bad guy. The simplest example of this in the games that I play is winning an all-in pot and the dealer not asking for the losing player to put his $1 chips into the pot (at $5-$10, these play in $5 increments). That can make the “pro” out to look very cutthroat and lead to an unwelcoming environment. But past these two instances, I very rarely ever get mad at dealers. And I am of the belief that a dealer would rather be tipped slightly less than average but be treated well than occasionally get large tips from players being frequently abusive.

January 10 — You can sometimes check-raise the turn with overpairs to gain max value from field caller

One of the things that really separates the good from the truly great players in no-limit hold’em is the ability to maximize value. If you hand read well, you may sometimes put in huge bets for value with hands as weak as second pair and fold hands as strong as the second nuts. Sometimes in pots that are small after the flop, we have to do certain things that may be out of the box to build a pot up and maximize our value. One of the best examples of this is check-raising out of the blinds on the flop or on the turn with a big hand like a set. Obviously, you do not want your opponents to fold out weaker hands, but sometimes you have to make a big raise to get more money in the pot.

An often-overlooked situation where you can use this type of line to increase the pot size is after being the preflop raiser in a single-raised pot. Especially if you are heads up, the pot really is not all that big and if you are trying to get max value, you need to maneuver the turn in a different way than you may be accustomed to, specifically when out of position. Let’s take at a look at a hand I played last week in the Commerce Casino’s $5-$10 game. My image was generally pretty good and, with a $2,000 stack, I opened to $35 with K K from under the gun. The cutoff, a recreational player that likes to make moves and is rich, called. The board came out Q 7 4 and I decided to make a $50 continuation bet. This player and I have played for years and we have history, and the good thing about this particular spot was that he never believes that I ever have anything. He quickly called and we saw a 2 turn. Now, in this case, this particular opponent had an extremely wide calling range on the flop due to our history. He could have had anything from air to top pair of queens. I also thought that he was the type to bet the turn if he was “floating” or bet to protect with any pair, putting me on a hand like ace-high. So when that disconnected deuce appeared, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to check-raise and build a pot.

Now obviously I am mostly targeting a queen, as it will be difficult for him to call with anything worse. But if he is not going to bluff the river all of that much and check behind with his medium-strength hands, I really wanted to go for gold. I thought that there was absolutely no way that he would ever bet then fold top pair, so when he did bet $90 after I checked to him I decided to raise him to $230, which he quickly called. The river brought out another deuce, which was a great card for me, and I value bet $400. He thought for a few seconds and called and my kings were good.

This technique is especially effective when you hold a big ace like A-K and an ace flops. In that situation, when someone calls your flop continuation bet, especially if there is more than one player in the pot post-flop, they are much more likely to have top pair than in the previous Q-7-4 example, where my opponent could have had a hand as weak as pocket threes.

You also do not have to have an overpair to make this play, but any hand that you feel can be best for value. I have made this play on a similar Q-7-4 type of board with a hand as weak as K-Q. It is much better though to have an overpair because combinations-wise, it is much more likely that your opponent will have top pair to pay you off. ♠

Follow Bart for daily strategy tips on Twitter @CrushLivePoker and @BartHanson. Check out his poker training site exclusively made for live cash game play at CrushLivePoker.com where he produces weekly podcasts and live training videos.