soap box corner: a long and ranty KITN for poker

[Al_Capone_Junior]

The first part of this is quoted from another thread. I'm too lazy to put in the link.

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I once was playing and after I open raised, another player 3 bet it. Folded around to me, I say,"It must be a race." as I toss out the extra bet. The dealer made me cap it; I called floor, who backed the decision of the dealer.

It was cheap lesson that you must be carefull what others may percieve what you are saying. In retrospect, I can see the point of the dealer, but that's just me.

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The way you have it written here it is quite clear from your ACTION that you are calling and meant to call. When someone says one thing (possibly ambiguous) and does another, the chips going over the line tend to reflect their clear intention.

Since I have a hard time hearing in the first place (too many years of bands and casinos) I tend to ask players to verify what they say most of the time. Because I ask for verification, I have very few problems of the nature being discussed in this thread. It's amazing how much better this works than jumping to conclusions. I doubt I've had more than five instances where I had to call the floor for a decision in the last six months, and none of them were to clear up a questionable player action. This partly reflects my working on the floor and having to clean up messes like these, you tend not to make those mistakes if you've had to fix them as a floor.

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I'm going to expand on this here because I feel it's of high importance.

Floor decisions are made when something is unclear, and thus the game cannot progress. Sometimes they're simple problems that are almost a formality for the floor to deal with. Too many times though, they're complete disasters. These disasters often wind up being whiny-azz posts on B&M. The major causes of these types of disasters are basically as follows:

1. Dealers in a hurry to make tips don't bother clarifying, verifying, or announcing the action. Major conflicts rarely arise from non action oriented problems, yet making sure the table action is clear and correct seems a low priority these days. I've cleaned up lots of messes whose main cause was the dealer rushing things to try and get more hands out. Players actually do appreciate clarity and will tip you better for it, even if you sacrifice a little bit of speed for it.

2. Dealers who are not players and/or are inexperienced (or perhaps just don't give a ****) and thus don't understand the importance of making sure the action is clear and correct. Many times these are "jump on the bandwagon" schmucks who just want easy money, but have no real interest in poker, and take no pride in their work. I have little patience
For these types.

3. Players who are inexperienced and don't understand any of these things either. Maybe if they tried using their brains for something other than watching poker on tv, they'd get a friggin' CLUE sometime this century. Don't count on it.

4. The utter failure of television and cardroom personelle to bother explaining or emphasising the importance of things like proper ettiquette. TV won't change, they will continue to lead the way in stupidity on all subjects. Cardroom personelle who don't educate players are majorly to blame here. I especially dislike rooms that strictly enforce stupid rules like "if you expose your hand it's automatically dead," or the racetrack rule, without making it clear to new players or tourists in advance. These rooms open up many angle shots to regulars as well.

5. The failure of cardrooms to have knowledgeable and experienced staff running the room, training and supervising the dealers, and making policy decisions/floor calls. I'll expand on this quite a bit.

The primary reason for this failure is that most casinos simply don't pay their floors nearly enough, so the experienced staff goes back to dealing. It's a travesty that in many casinos a pit boss in table games may have four tables or so to watch, but be making 50% more (or perhaps higher) than a poker supervisor, who may have ten or twelve tables to watch on a busy night, and may be in charge of the poker bank too.

In vegas, most rooms don't pay more than $20 an hour before tax for a poker floorperson. Typically this person is totally on their own, often without anyone in the casino that could help them even if they wanted to. It's very common for late swing and grave to have only one person in the casino capable of supervising poker. Usually even the casino manager doesn't know poker at all. I'd like to see these jerkoff casino execs who decide on these ridiculously low wages try doing this job for a night or two, then try and continue acting magnanimous about the pay they offer. Low floor pay insures that floorperson candidate pools will remain strictly bottom of the barrel inexperienced, power trippers, or the occasional unlucky dealer with carpal tunnel.

And let's talk tips. Dealers get lots of them. Floors usually get few, especially in the small stakes rooms, where ironically they are likely to have far more responsibility, anð far more problems! The dealers SHOULD tip out the floors every day, thus insuring the floors make similarly good wages. In two los angeles casinos I've been in, dealers must "tip out." There's no conflict of interest because it's required, and as a result these rooms can keep experienced, quality people running the room. Not so in vegas. Accepting tips from the dealers in vegas is often grounds for being FIRED. The floors are supposed to look skyward and thank those extra-magnanimous casino idiots, err, execs for the whopping $160/day pre-tax they make. Meanwhile they get to be cashier also (no extra pay of course) and watch dealer after dealer cash out $200+ just in tokes, not to mention the dealers make 1/3 what the floor does on top of that. Some real super-bung-hole mega-jerkoff casino execs right here in vegas also came up with the idea they should make the floor put what tips they do make into a locked box to be sent thru the cage, taxed, then put on their paychecks (which are often wrong in the first place, always against the employee of course). If you need more than one guess which company I'm referring to, you're either ignorant or an idiot, possibly both.


It's not at all uncommon for the poker floorperson to have to be the cashier, as well as the supervisor. This puts them in charge of typically $40K-$100K of cash and chips. If they make any major mistakes they can expect to pay out of their own pocket The limits for variance for a supervisor or cashier are typically $100/month. Of course if you're over this month, it don't count for next. And believe me, no matter how careful you are, it's easy to make mistakes, especially if you're majorly overloaded. There are a couple rooms that have cashiering procedures in place that majorly comprimise the whole process, increasing the opportunity for scam artists to do their dirty work.

If the room is short-staffed and busy, the floor may get to be the brush, cashier, and floor all at once. This is a situation I've experienced many times, and overload isn't even close to a good description of what it's like. There is nothing you can do but make your choices on what you're going to neglect in order to get the most critical stuff done. Supervising the games always gets pushed aside in these situations.

To make matters even worse, the lone floorperson is probably working late on swing or on grave, where alcohol is far more likely to influence the events of the day. However, if they were properly staffed, floors could actually supervise, and often times would stop problems before they started.

Most rooms do little or nothing to give their dealers "continuing education." Once you're hired, they don't care if you ever improve. Poker is complicated, rules and procedures need to constantly be learned, relearned, and reminded. Ironically, these places are often write-up happy for any little thing, even if dealer tune-ups and continuing education would be a much better solution.

When it comes to these big vegas casinos, what can be said other than "welcome to friggin' disneyland."

As for the rest of poker, people, get with the friggin' program already. You don't apply for a job as a truck driver if you can't drive a stick shift. So why so many clueless ***** in the poker world? Why should we lower our standards so much? Cuz there's money involved? Line up morons, just let me get my boots on.

Al