How Much Does Poker Dealers Make
Posted By admin On 31/03/22Is a Career as a Poker Dealer Right for You?
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- How Much Do Poker Dealers Make
- How Much Does Poker Dealers Make In Florida
- Poker Dealer Job
- Poker Dealer Salary With Tips
- How Much Do Poker Dealers Make In Tips
This typically means 50% of dealers pocketed more than USD 19,290 and the remaining 50% pocketed less. It should be noted that poker dealers can also make money from tips. Therefore, as a result of this, the income of dealers largely depends on the location the dealer works and their overall performance in.
Compared to being a player, dealing has one big benefit – you get paid regardless of how the cards fall. There is plenty of demand for experienced dealers around the world. These include regular casinos and card-rooms – as well as the big tournament events like the World Series of Poker. Before you jump in and start dealing, this guide gives you an objective overview of what this involves.
Here are how the various aspects of becoming a poker dealer are broken down below:
Dealers can make as much as $100,000 per year. The average dealing job at a small casino only pays half that much, but many do pay more than $25 per hour. That's a pretty good starting pay, right? How Much Money Can a Poker Dealer Make? Base salaries for poker dealers are low. These range from $15,000 to $20,000 per year – a minimum wage job. Benefits are based on this salary range. Of course, poker dealers make a lot more than this. A good dealer can earn between $30k and $60k a year. This extra income comes via tips. A very experienced poker dealer can make $100k+. To get to this level, you’ll need to be dealing the biggest games and working at peak times. Answered August 7 Most WSOP dealers make somewhere around $8,000 - $12,000 for the entire series. As the other poster says, this is before the expenses needed to be out there in the first place for the duration of the series. The average poker player needs to have enough in his bankroll to serve as insurance against large losses. The consensus on how much a professional player should keep in his bankroll ranges from 200 to 2,000 times the big blind.
- Pros and Cons: An objective look at the benefits and drawbacks of dealing cards.
- Routes to Becoming a Poker Dealer: Dealing schools and working your way through the ranks.
- What a Poker Dealer Does? There are multiple aspects of this role that you might not have considered.
- Qualities of Poker Dealers: What kind of skills and attributes do successful poker dealers have?
- Dealing Poker vs Dealing Casino Games: How poker compares to dealing blackjack and other card games.
- Income Expectations: How Much Money Can a Poker Dealer Make?
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Pros and Cons of Becoming a Poker Dealer
It takes a certain type of person to stick out a career as a poker dealer. You’ll need to be sharp enough to keep track of the pots, rules and cards – as well as dealing with the human elements. Here is a quick overview of the pros and cons, which are discussed in more detail in the section below.
Benefits of Dealing Poker:
- Steady income: You’ll get a base salary, plus tips. year.
- Social Elements: This is a service job, and if you enjoy working with people it can be an enjoyable way to earn a living.
- Plenty of Demand: Casinos around the world need experienced dealers.
- Retirement + Insurance: Dealers for big casino corporations get employee benefits.
- Flexible Schedules: With poker being 24/7, many casinos will have shifts which suit your lifestyle.
- Learn on the Job: If you deal the bigger stakes, you get to watch the poker experts in action, which can only improve your own game.
Drawbacks of Dealing Poker:
- Standing Up: You’ll be on your feet the entire time during your shifts.
- Unsocial Hours: When you start to deal, you’ll be lower down the pecking order when it comes to picking the best shifts.
- Tips are Variable: Depending on the players, tips can fluctuate widely. Since these make up a lot of your income, you need to account for those ‘dry’ days.
- Disgruntled Players: Some players take out their frustration on losing a pot on the dealer, you’ll need to be emotionally tough enough to cope.
- Seasonal Work: Poker does have down periods, when players are scarce.
How Much Money Can a Poker Dealer Make?
Base salaries for poker dealers are low. These range from $15,000 to $20,000 per year – a minimum wage job. Benefits are based on this salary range.
Of course, poker dealers make a lot more than this. A good dealer can earn between $30k and $60k a year. This extra income comes via tips. A very experienced poker dealer can make $100k+. To get to this level, you’ll need to be dealing the biggest games and working at peak times.
How Do Poker Dealers Make Tips:
- Per Pot: Most players will tip the dealer $1 or more when winning a decent pot. This can be bigger in the high stakes games, where pots of $1000+ are being pushed regularly.
- Tournament Tips: Many casinos include tips for dealers in the tournament buy-ins. For example, the World Series of Poker has between 2% and 4% included for each event.
- Tournament discretionary Tips: Often, the winner of a tournament will give a tip, which is usually divided among the active dealers.
Note that in some countries, tipping is not permitted in casinos. This is balanced by higher base salaries for the dealers. Some casinos pool tips and divide these among all staff equally, others allow dealers to keep their own tips.
Tips don’t only depend on the size of the game you are dealing. Your personality plays a role. Players are more likely to tip competent and personable dealers.
How to Become a Poker Dealer?
The usual route is to attend a training program. This involves a 4 to 8-week course, which will cover the many different aspects of dealing. These courses range from $1000 to $2000.
Many casinos have big enough demand for dealers that they run their own training programs. You will not need to pay for these if you graduate and then deal for that casino.
If you have plenty of experience dealing, though no formal qualification, you can still apply for a job as a poker dealer. This will involve a live audition, with the poker room manager watching you closely. If you impress, you’ll be hired – and possibly offered on the job training for any areas you lack experience with.
Exactly What a Poker Dealer Does?
You might think dealing poker is all about shuffling cards and pushing pots. There is a lot more to the role than that. Primarily, dealing is a customer service job – keeping control of the game and enforcing the rules need to go alongside making sure the players have a great experience. If they do not, your tips will be small – and the number of games will fall.
Here are the primary tasks of a poker dealer:
- Card Skills: Shuffling the deck, keeping count of the cards, burning cards for the flop turn and river and collecting mucked cards needs to be done accurately every time.
- Controlling the Pot: The dealer needs to announce bets (though not the pot size), deal with side pots and rules on minimum raise sizes that reopen the betting – and push the pot to the right player.
- Enforcing the Rules: Poker involves a lot of small rules, and the dealer is expected to know them all by heart. These can involve capped betting limits, betting the nuts when someone is all-in during a tournament and how to handle situations with exposed cards. If there is a dispute, the dealer is expected to call the ‘floor’ to help out.
- Watching for Cheating: This can take many forms including soft-play, collusion and under-betting the pot. Dealers need to be aware at all times, and to report anything unclear to the floor.
- Dealing with Unruly / Nasty Players:Live poker unfortunately attracts a lot of unpleasant characters. While often they are harmless, a dealer does sometimes bear the brunt of abuse from certain types. An experienced dealer will know when this crosses the line – and call either security or the floor to deal with it.
- Knowing Many Poker Variants: Casinos run many variations of poker, and a dealer needs to be able to switch between them seamlessly.
- Concentration for Long Periods: Avoiding mistakes involves being focused for long periods (shifts usually last an hour, before a 20-minute break). You’ll be expected to remain 100% focused all the time – even a rare error can significantly disrupt a game.
- Signalling the ‘Eye in the Sky’: Security cameras watch every game. When you see a dealer tapping the table (for example with a chip given as a tip) those are for the benefit of security. You’ll be expected to stick by these rules and know the different signals for specific situations.
Personal Qualities of Poker Dealers
So far, I have talked about the practical aspects of dealing cards. This section flips things around, asking whether you have the personal qualities to enjoy this line of work.
A poker dealer needs to enjoy working with people. Despite the many practical skills, this is first and foremost a service job. If you prefer your own company, then this might not be the right job for you. If you like interacting with a diverse range of personalities – and can keep smiling when things get tough – you could be the perfect fit.
You’ll need a thick skin. Bad tempered players are a fact of life for the poker dealing profession. Many of these will make up for their own bad play by taking it out on the dealer. Patience is needed – you won’t be able to answer back (though calling security or the floor is always an option!).
Dealers also need to be good at mental arithmetic. This comes into play with side-pots, pot-limit betting and many other situations. You also need to be fast and accurate at reading boards – pushing the pot to the wrong player is a major mistake.
Personal flexibility is needed, especially at the start of your career. The prime shifts will usually go to the most experienced and reliable dealers. This means you’ll have to take the remaining shifts while you get your foot in the door. Flexibility will win you a lot of credit with the poker room management, and you’ll soon find yourself getting a better pick of shifts.
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Dealing Poker vs Dealing Other Casino Games
Poker is not the only game which requires dealers. There is demand for people to deal blackjack, spin roulette wheels and join craps teams. Those games have a house edge, and you’ll be facilitating a welcoming environment for people to enjoy themselves while losing money. The balance is that there is plenty of variety – especially when you consider all the casino ‘carnival games’.
If you enjoy poker and want to learn from experienced players – then dealing those games is the way to go. This can allow you to learn on the job. Things like physical tells, which require years of experience to pick up, can be very obvious to experienced dealers.
They come from all over the country and even overseas. Hundreds of men and women flood into the Rio every day, not to play in a tournament and to dream of winning a big score, but to work. They are the backbone of the WSOP. They are, of course, the dealers.
However, in a stressful time such as the World Series — where millions of dollars are on the line over the course of a few hands — tempers can rise. There have been a number of altercations, both verbal and physical, at the World Series this year between players and dealers, where disgruntled players wonder about the experience of the dealers and dealers express their frustration at the maturity level of the players.
In this feature, Card Player goes behind the scenes to explore the hiring process of the dealers for the WSOP, how much they may make in a given summer, and the major issues they face at the World Series.
Hiring Process
Survival is not guaranteed at the World Series. Whether it is the stress, the work load, or the pay, many dealers quit long before the main event ever begins. Because this is a yearly trend, Harrah’s adjusts its hiring process to ensure that it has enough dealers by the time the main event arrives.
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“We typically lose 15 percent to 20 percent of what we hire within the first couple of weeks of the World Series of Poker said Jack Effel, WSOP tournament director.
The hiring process begins months before the first hand is ever dealt at the WSOP. First, Harrah’s contacts all of the dealers that left in “good standing” the previous year to see if they would like to return again. Of the 720 dealers who completed the 2008 WSOP, approximately 600 returned for 2009.
“Then we went out searching for another 400,” said Effel.
Harrah’s set up an online application, looking for at least six months experience for each dealer. If they fulfilled that requirement, Harrah’s granted the applicant either a live or phone audition.
“If we had a person who works at Bellagio, we’re not going to waste their time to come down here to show off their technical skills,” said Effel. “We know they deal all the games that are played at the World Series of Poker.”
In a phone audition, dealers are quizzed specifically in their proficiency in pot-limit Omaha, seven-card stud eight-or-better, and deuce-to-seven triple draw — some of the arguably more complicated games that are offered at the WSOP. Harrah’s judges their knowledge on a 0-100 scale.
“If they got below a 70 on the phone audition, it was, ‘Try again next year,’” said Effel. “If they got between 70-80, we (invited them for) a live audition. If they got above an 80, they were definitely in.”
Of the new hires, Effel says that 60 percent make it from the phone audition alone, while the other 40 percent are offered jobs after live auditions.
Payment
Poker players often wonder how much dealers make during the World Series, especially when considering tipping after a significant tournament cash.
Effel says that it’s not as much as some people think it is.
“They don’t make as much as people perceive them to make because they’re traveling from all over the country and even the world, and it’s expensive to live here,” said Effel. “It varies depending on the dealer. I’ve heard some of them make as much as $10,000 for the two months, but that’s before tax, and everything is taxed. But these guys have to pay for a place to stay, they have to feed themselves, and there are travel expenses, too.”
WSOP Communications Director Seth Palansky gave the specifics when it came to dealer pay.
“Dealers get paid $6.85 an hour plus toke and tips,” said Palansky, defining ‘toke’ as the amount of money taken out of a tournament prize pool for the dealers. In any given World Series tournament, a percentage of the total entry pool is reserved for tournament staff.
For the $10,000 main event, the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. tournament, and other premiere events, tournament staff receives 1.8 percent of the total entry pool. So, since the main event garnered $64.94 million in entry money, that means that $1,168,920 — or 1.8 percent — was set aside for and to be spread out amongst the tournament staff. If one assumes that there are about 1,000 tournament staff members, and that the pay is spread equally, that means each member of the tournament staff would make approximately $1,169 in toke for the 13-day tournament.
For smaller events, the percentage taken for the tournament staff is higher. For an event such as the $1,000 Stimulus Special, 3 percent of the total entry pool is reserved for tournament staff.
This is separate from the entry fee that Harrah’s takes. For example, in the main event, Harrah’s takes an additional 4.2 percent of the total entry pool for entry fees (making up 6 percent combined rake). For the Stimulus Special, 7 percent of the total entry pool is reserved for entry fees (making up a 10 percent overall rake).
Of course, dealers don’t work a normal 9-5 workday. They get paid based on the number of “downs” they complete, otherwise known as a 30-minute shift in the dealer box.
Lisa Spencer*, a third-year WSOP dealer, says that dealers make approximately $20 a down in a tournament, while acknowledging that they can make more in a cash game. Still, she said it pales in comparison to what she’s used to.
“The money’s not worth it. It gets worse and worse every year,” said Spencer, who has dealt an underground game in Texas for nearly 20 years. She says she only deals at the World Series so that if the Lone Star State ever does legalize and regulate poker, her experience at the WSOP will give her a step up. “Unless you live here, it’s not financially worth it for most of us, anymore.”
While Spencer says that this will likely be her last year at the World Series, other dealers such as Adam Wilson* say that while there are some problems, it is worth the occasional headache.
“It pays to be a dealer. I like what I do. For me, this isn’t work,” said Wilson, who is employed by a local Las Vegas casino as a dealer during the year. This is his fourth summer he has spent with the World Series. “This is going to pay for my vacation.”
However, he admits that there are times when he struggles putting up with the players.
Dealing with the Players
Wilson has served in the U.S. military for 11 years, completing two combat tours. He’s experienced the horrors of war, as he and his comrades fought for a common purpose. And he’s swallowed his share of pain, as he carried away the body bags of men and women who didn’t make it out of a firefight.
So, forgive him when he gets a little frustrated when players can’t remain respectful and courteous when he’s dealing a poker game at the World Series.
Cached
“It’s not all of them, it’s just some of them,” said Wilson. “Listen, I’ve seen the worst in life. Just relax. It’s only a game.”
How Much Do Poker Dealers Make
Abuse from players is one of the major issues dealers cite when asked about their lives at the World Series. Most of the time it comes verbally, when a player makes a disparaging remark after a bad beat. But there have been at a few reported cases of actual physical altercations at the 2009 WSOP.
“Why on earth would you ever touch the dealer?” asked Spencer. “One dealer had his hand broken by the player. A female dealer had a bottle of water thrown at her because of a bad beat. We call this ‘adult daycare’ for a reason.”
The World Series and the Rio has given penalties and even banned players from the casino for a certain amount of time for some of the incidents. Some of the dealers, however, wish they would do more.
“The floor (supervisor) isn’t necessarily protecting dealers the way that he should,” said Spencer. “We’re treated like red-headed stepchildren.”
How Much Does Poker Dealers Make In Florida
Wilson said that it’s almost as if players forget that they’re human beings sometimes.
Poker Dealer Job
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“We have kids, we’re married, we have moms and dads. We’re going to make mistakes,” said Wilson. “Just treat us with courtesy.”
Of course, it’s not as if every poker player acts immaturely. Wilson describes the problem players as “knuckleheads” and makes sure to clarify that there are a lot of respectful players out there. Clearly a fan of the game, he points out Mike Matusow and Phil Ivey as two pros he “had the privilege of dealing to.”
Poker Dealer Salary With Tips
“It was cool; they talk to you and they are respectful,” said Wilson. “It’s not so much the big-name pros who are the problem, it’s the wannabe pros who think they’re pros or who are friends of the pros.”
As the main event rages on to form the newest November Nine, Wilson just hopes that players remember that dealers are just trying to make it to the next day, just like them.
*Names of the dealers have been changed at their request, for fear of consequences for talking to the media.