Pooled Tips - Evidence that its bad

[jjshabado]

I've been hearing a lot more ragging on Foxwoods dealers, and blaming it on their pooled tips. This has been said so many times but I think people are exaggerating how much this effects quality of dealing. When I'm playing live I almost always tip $1 for a pot bigger than 2-3 BB. I'll tip 2-3% of dealers slightly better because they're really good. I'll not tip (or skip some pots) 1-2% of dealers because they blow. But they have to be pretty bad before I don't tip them. I've rarely seen other people purposefully stiff a dealer for being slow/inappropriate. I have seen other players tip more to entertaining dealers more often, but those are also dealers that I often don't find particularly effective when it comes to dealing.

I would suspect that the middle 80-90% of dealers get tipped roughly the same. So I don't see that chip pooling is this huge factor in crappy dealers at Foxwoods. I would suspect that its caused more by the fact that there are fewer good dealers that live in Conneticut, and there's a lack of competition from other casinos.

Is there any research that supports chip pooling is this horrible drag on dealing effectively? I'm thinking something like the amount of tips per dealer per limit over some relatively large amount of time. If that showed that the vast majority of dealers made approximately the same amount then I think you'd have to draw the conclusion that most patrons don't reward good service with extra tips / bad service with fewer tips.

One final note, I understand the Capitalist vs Communist debate that having a dealer receive direct compensation for their work will be an incentive for them to work harder. I agree with this, I also believe non-pooling tips is a good idea, I just don't think its that big of a factor on dealer quality. (Actually I would implement a system of non-pooling tips up to a maximum of something like $100 a down, the overage gets pooled for everyone to account for those occassional crazy-ass tables of rich people that tip insanely).

Edit: I edited the title to better reflect what I'm asking about.