[pokerswami]

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Yes...we know what the reason is...his dealers are not well trained. Rather than giving them proper training, he tells them to tap the table.
Whether I am new here or not has little relevance to professional dealing techniques. Nor does Randy's experience in poker. But you don't know my experience, yet you make an assumption that the new guy must be wrong....because Randy has been doing it this way for a long time. Lots of people in poker do things incorrectly for a long time. That's the probem.
But if he wants a room full of dealers that can't follow the action to continually tap or pound the table....I guess he can have it.

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I believe strongly that you're wrong. I don't want this to degenerate into any type of personal attack back and forth, so please consider the points that follow.

First off, a quote from the 2+2 book, The Professional Poker Dealer’s Handbook, page 84, under Burning a Card, “1. Always tap the table before you burn. This is to notify the players of your intent so that they can stop your action should the betting be incomplete.”

Of course it’s not just the betting that is of concern. It warns the players that you are about to deal card(s) and gives them a chance to stop you if anything is amiss or they’re unsure of something important.

Since you referred to dealer training so strongly in your posts in this thread, then consider that one of the most important attributes of a good dealer is that he follows proper procedures routinely. The exact thing you want from a dealer is that he habitually uses the correct procedures.

There are many things that tend to degrade a dealer’s performance as he is dealing. Very often, dealing is done under less than optimum table conditions and dealer alertness conditions. But the point of good training is that the dealer will continue to follow the procedures that he was trained to do even under adverse conditions.

I have many times been on duty for more than 12 hours, even more than 20 hours more than a couple dozen times. You may consider this a mismanagement issue, but you still want a dealer who is sleep-deprived to be in the habit of following proper routines. In other words, dealers often find themselves dealing while sleep-deprived, or after taking necessary cold/allergy medicine or dealing with family/economic/health/employee relationship/player relationship/behavior issues. Their focus will be less than optimum. You want them to let the players know they are about to act with their tapping to give the best chance for that dealer at that time in those circumstances to not make a mistake. The main point of this is that you want them to always tap so that they will always tap, even when they know that nothing else needs to be done prior to their next action.

Even if a dealer is fresh, the table conditions can be such that he can be unaware of the real situation and thus act prematurely. The tap adds another level of protection to prevent this. Have you never seen a dealer dealing to 10 or even 11 seated players with multiple sweaters, 20 loud conversations, yelling and commotion all around plus other loud mayhem at various points around the cardroom?

It’s very easy to miss a player saying “raise” or anything else under these conditions.

It’s very easy to go straight from dealing one type of game/stakes for hours straight to another game and forget to do something necessary before acting. This can be greatly enhanced with the loud boisterous atmosphere as previously cited plus being sleep-deprived plus other mentioned and unmentioned distractions.

So, what you do want are dealers trained to routinely follow procedures that tend to minimize errors. Tapping before certain dealer actions is absolutely one of these procedures.

edited to add: "YouTalkFunny": I must have missed a page of responses before I started typing, or I wouldn't have repeated the book quote you already posted.