[bav]

[ QUOTE ]
Maybe I'm retarded here but, if I'm playing in a tournament, where there is an add-on that goes directly to the dealers, I will not tip the dealers if I win, as they have already received a tip.

[/ QUOTE ]
Each and every tourney I know of in Vegas includes a dealer toke in the buy-in in some form. Some just lump it in with the buy-in (Wynn's $330, for instance--some of that goes to the dealers), while others use the "optional" $2, $5 or $10 add-on. Yes, some tourneys have started up without this and pretty quickly found that they HAD to include some gratuity upfront or the dealers would revolt.

So if you found out the house was giving 2% of the gross to the wait staff in a restaurant, would you refuse to tip 15% (or even 13%) because they were already being tipped? Some of the Vegas tourneys are kinda like that.

Consider the Sahara $42+$20 tourney. $2 of that $42 goes to the dealers. If they get 100 entrants, $200 goes into the dealer toke pool. The tourney will have 10 tables that last a full 1.5 hours and then start breaking. And it will slowly whittle down until the event ends after 5 or 6 hours. The dealers will have put in something like 30 man hours by the time it ends (just trying to estimate--may be a bit more or a bit less, I don't know the actual numbers as I've never asked anyone). That's about $7/hr in tokes on top of their minimum wage while they're dealing. That's a small fraction of what they make dealing cash games.

That $2 is a nice start, and it keeps the crew from starving if nobody tokes, but it's not adequate. The players who go deep really should scrape up a bit more. If out of a $4000 prize pool everybody tokes 5%, that adds another $200 to the Sahara toke pool... still not what they make from cash games, but not quite so bad.

In other tourneys the enforced toke is plenty. There are some Vegas tourneys that take $10 out from each entrant and the event lasts 3 hours with 30 players. Those dealers are doing just fine without any extra from the moneyers.

There are some rooms where the dealers are punished by putting them in to deal tourneys, and there are some rooms where that's a reward. I always try to evaluate each tourney I play in after I hit the money to decide how much I feel I need to toke based on how much I think the dealers will be making per hour.