Paying for food/drinks/etc: Out of stack or wallet?

[TMTTR]

Too much thinking. Use your chips.

[DonkeyKongSr]

Huh? Too much thinking about something can affect your winrate? WTF?

I have a $10 bill in my wallet and I have chips in front of me. Doesn't it make more sense to take a few seconds and pull the bill out of my wallet?

[Magicmanu]

I always pay from my pocket. It makes it easier to keep accurate track of wins and losses.

[that_pope]

I pay out of my stack, but I am a limit player who always have enough on the table to go plenty of bets (usually everyone covered if I am up more than a rack) unless I am on some long tilt driven journey that usually only happens once or twice a year.

But you bring up a point I thought of a few years ago when playing 1/2 NL at IP. They had a max buy-in of $100 at the time, and I had about doubled up when I got into a big pot with a player who had me covered. I had flopped top set w/ aces and led into the pot after raising preflop. As he was contemplating his action, the drink lady came by and being the alcoholic I am, I had to tip her $1 for my Corona she was bringing me. The guy pushed all in, I tipped her a dollar from my stack and called...if I had done it out of my pocket, $1 more for me, but that is pretty nitty now isn't it...

[that_pope]

[ QUOTE ]
I always pay from my pocket. It makes it easier to keep accurate track of wins and losses.

[/ QUOTE ]

Since I play semi professionally, and limit at that, I enjoy paying from my stack and having that roll into my wins or losses, because eating a meal at the table is something I wouldn't have done if I didn't go to the casino, I would have had a far cheaper meal at home. So I count that against my wins/losses just as you do with dealer tips/rake.

[Seb86]

OP is 100% right, well it doenst make a HUGE difference but yeah once in a while it will cost you money to pay with chips on the table.

[LateNiteRush]

The place that I play at gives us free food, but I always tip out of my stack.

[Poshua]

[ QUOTE ]
In lower limit games, this can add up to quite a large percentage of winnings over time. If everyone at the table is paying for random stuff out of their stacks, you could be seeing $20-$30+/hour disappearing off the table in addition to rake and tips.

[/ QUOTE ]

Unless you're playing in California (as I discuss in the footnote at the bottom of my post) I think this is probably not important enough to worry about, for the following reasons:

1. While you can control your own spending practices, you can't make your opponents pay out of pocket, so it only makes sense to analyze how drink tips affect your stack size, not your opponents'.

2. Marginal increases in your stack only impact winnings in hands where you are all-in and your opponent covers you; such situations should only account for a small fraction of your net win. Also, if you are +EV, you should be accumulating chips and covering your opponents more often than they cover you, further diminishing the importance of marginal increases in your stack size.

3. As you point out, while having a bigger stack will increase your net if you are +EV, this will increase both your wins and your losses. The net effect will be a small fraction of the gross positive effect.

4. The main situation where the positive effects would manifest, as you describe, are situations where you repeatedly double through other players (with you being covered) rendering the effect exponential. For this to happen, it would have to be a game where lots of other players at the table have also built stacks of several times the max buy-in, enabling them to cover you after you have doubled up once or twice. At most games, this would be an unusual circumstance.*

*One key exception would be a game with a very low buy-in cap, where players frequently bust out and re-buy, and other players routinely build monster stacks many times the buy-in. I have seen games like this, particularly in the Bay Area, and I understand this is common in LA. In this case your strategy might indeed have a measurable (though, I would still contend, not particularly large) effect.

[bav]

Posh has good points. It's a rare 4-hour NL session I play that I ever end up all-in. The folks with big stacks tend to be more careful and it takes a couple of pretty big hands to spark a big pot. On the other hand, the folks with $100 in a $300 cap game are shoving the flop with second pair. So the times it actually impacts your bottom line to not have kept an extra $10 on the table are pretty limited, and in part balanced by the times you woulda lost that extra $10 (dunno 'bout you, but I do not ALWAYS win my all-ins).

[bav]

If you are playing in a capped game and you have more than the cap in your stack, and you think having a big stack makes a big positive difference, then sure, pay outta yer pocket. If you're below the cap, and believe all of this, why aren't you topping up your stack after every hand?

Just read here in Cardplayer where Ed Miller spells out for the masses why having a short stack is not a disadvantage. It's been discussed a lot on 2+2, but the myth continues. This is the first good article I recall seeing on the topic in Cardplayer. http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/17063