Here’s a Tip

“Fantastic! Another tipping thread is just what this board needs.”

On a popular internet poker message board that I frequent, this is a common response when someone poses a question in the non-poker forums about tipping in every day situations. How much should I tip the pizza guy? How much should I tip the bellman?  Should I tip the movers? The lack of understanding of the basics of adulthood in that forum is stunning, and the proliferation of tipping questions has become a running joke.

Of course, since it is a non-poker section of the site, tipping in poker is not discussed. That type of tipping, though, can be very confusing to someone who is only accustomed to playing online. As we all know, if you play online you do not have to tip the non-existent dealer. But in a brick and mortar poker room, tipping is expected. For newcomers to live poker, the entire environment can be intimidating; worrying about how much to tip the dealer is the last thing you need. So, here are some…uh…tips?

Let me get one thing out of the way right now. Yes, you should tip the dealer in a cash game. Dealers are similar to waiters in the sense that they don’t make much of an hourly wage – they rely on tips. And while you don’t have to have an advanced degree to deal poker in a casino, it does take skill to do it successfully. A good dealer will make the game more enjoyable by dealing more hands per hour, making few mistakes, and even adding some personality to the game at times. Show your appreciation and tip.

Besides, if nobody tipped, the casinos would have to pay the dealers more and the rake would increase. We wouldn’t want that now, would we?

The $10,000 question, then, is how much should you tip? Many live poker novices get nervous and think that they need to make a good impression by tipping a few bucks every hand they win. This is silly. You will eat into your profits to the point where you will have to do extremely well to make a profit. Think about it. Let’s say you are playing $2/$4. You limp pre-flop along with one other, the small blind calls, and the big blind checks. On the flop, you bet and one player calls. On the turn, you bet and the other guy folds. You just won a $12 pot (not counting your final bet), $4 of which was yours. Now, you tip the dealer $2. You just gave away 25 percent of your profit. If you did that in other areas of life, you’d go broke in a hurry.

At limits that low, 50 cents should suffice. That might sound like a piddling sum, but if the dealer got 50 cents every pot, he could end up making somewhere around $15 per hour in tips. And that’s 50 cents on a medium-ish pot. For larger pots, feel free to increase that to $1. In higher stakes games (I generally think of a game as being in the “higher stakes” category when the big bet is at least $10), $1 is good for a standard pot, with an increase of another buck for a large pot. If the pot is really small, don’t even worry about tipping. If it gets crazy big, sure, go ahead and get generous if you like.

Tournaments are a different animal altogether. In tournaments, part of the price you pay to enter the tournament is not included in the prize pool. Instead, it is given to the house, the dealers, and the tournament staff. So, in paying to play in a tournament, you have already tipped the dealers. For example, in the 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event, 4.8 percent of the $10,000 buy-in was withheld for “entry fees” (Harrah’s got this portion), while 1.8 percent went to the tournament staff. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that the staff was only the dealers (which is probably isn’t) – you would have already tipped the dealers $180 just by playing.

Yet, it is often expected of those who make the money in a tournament to contribute an additional gratuity to the dealers. Those final few finishers who make the most money are generally under more pressure to give up some of their winnings. There was a big controversy in 2007 when Jerry Yang won the WSOP. Apparently, Chris Ferguson accompanied him to get his check (over $8 million) and, when Yang was asked how much additional money he would like to give the dealers, Ferguson advised him to give nothing, as a significant sum of money had already come out of his portion of the prize pool. Some people thought not giving anything was terrible. Others saw no problem with this, as the tips were already taken out of the prize pool.

I can see both sides, but personally, I feel that is appropriate to still give something additional to the dealers if you win a significant amount of money. The term “significant” will vary from person to person and from buy-in to buy-in, but it is usually rather obvious at the time. For instance, I won $2,500 by placing third in $100 buy-in (with re-buys) tournament once. I ended up tipping an additional $100, which, if you do the math, is 4 percent. I thought this was reasonable, as did the more knowledgeable poker players around me at the time. To me, $2,500 was a “significant” sum of money, especially when compared to the $100 buy-in. If I had just squeaked into the money and made about $200, I might not have tipped, as a decent tip would have comprised a sizeable percentage of my profit, while a smaller tip would have almost been insulting.

Generally, anywhere from about two to five percent is a solid amount to tip. The greater the purse, the lower the tip that is necessary. Extreme example, but say you won $10 million at the WSOP – do you really think a 10 percent tip, or $1 million, is necessary?  Or even $500,000? Probably not.

The bottom line to tipping is to give an amount with which you can feel comfortable. Show your appreciation for a job well done both monetarily and with honest praise. If you are not sure what do, don’t hesitate to ask people with more experience.