Three small things that matter in poker Part 3: Tipping

In days of old it was big things that made the difference between winning and losing poker players; players either knew pot odds, the chance of making a straight draw, and starting hand rankings or they didn’t. In today’s poker world the emphasis has shifted to the little things in poker, as the overwhelming majority of poker players understand the basic concepts of the game that keep them from making huge mistake after huge mistake.

Because of this shift, as poker players we need to look at all of the little things we can do to add to our win-rate, even if by themselves they seem insignificant -after all making 10 changes that each add $1 an hour to your win rate is still $10 an hour!

In this series of articles I’m going to look at three incredibly simple things you can do to increase your win rate. In Part 1 I looked at posting when you enter a game, in Part 2 I examined leaving before the blinds, and in this the final installment I will look at tipping practices:

How to determine your tipping amounts:

Tipping is a part of live poker that you must deal with: It’s not a mandatory practice, but if you plan on playing a lot of poker in a card-room you’ll need to tip the dealers and staff in order to keep your playing experience pleasurable. If you don’t tip, and you are a regular player, you will find your cards misfired from the dealers -and at an enhanced speed, will receive a lot of hurried “your action” remarks, and all sorts of difficulties. The problem is even worse if you are involved in a 50/50 ruling where the decision could go either way, because guess what, it’s likely going against you!

Now, you don’t have to be a huge tipper to reap the benefits, and the dealers and staff understand that you are trying to make a living; you just have to be generous enough, and there are two ways to go about this.

Tip-Worthy Pots: The most common method of tipping is to tip for any pot won over a certain amount. For me a tip-worthy pot is anything over 10 Big Bets in the game, so if you are playing $5/$10 Limit Holdem you would tip on any pot you win over $100.

The Dealer-Change Tip: My preferred method is to tip the dealer when they initially sit down, By doing this I am effectively making my tips an hourly expense instead of a varied amount based on my profits and losses for the session. So, if the casino changes dealers every 30 minutes, and you are a low-limit player you can tip each dealer $2, adding $4 to your hourly expenses -obviously if you play higher or lower you just adjust the amount, or lower it depending on the normal tip amount where you play.

This second method allows you to accurately track just how much you are paying in tips -if you play 1,000 hours in a year and tip $4 per hour; you know you have paid $4,000 in tips.