Professional Poker Dealer Salary
How Much Money Can a Poker Dealer Make? Base salaries for poker dealers are low. These range from $15,000 to $20,000 per year – a minimum wage job. Benefits are based on this salary range. The average Dealer Sales Manager salary is $47,196 as of January 29, 2021, but the salary range typically falls between $41,708 and $55,044. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession.
What is Dealer Training?
Dealer Training is the online poker dealer school, which teaches you how to deal poker like a professional poker dealer. It was created out of necessity. We needed trained dealers for our pub poker league and didn't have the time or money to send our dealers to a brick and mortar dealing course. Our poker league was growing quickly and we needed an online poker dealer school, but one didn't exist at the time. So we created it. The online course walks you through everything you need to know to be a successful poker dealer.
Why do you want to learn to deal poker?
- I'm a casino / card room manager. I want to provide training for my prospective dealers.
- I'm a poker league owner / manager. I want professionally trained dealers to improve my poker league.
- I'm a poker dealer or prospective dealer. I want to learn how to deal poker like a professional.
- I'm a poker player. I want to increase my edge at the table by learning to deal poker.
- I'm trying to claim my free Dealer Training course. Where do I enter my code?
The Dealer Training course includes text, pictures, videos, slideshows, and detailed practice outline.
What is Dealer Training?
If you’ve always wanted to become a poker dealer, but you haven’t had the time or money to pay for an expensive offline course, our Dealer Training program is perfect for you. Dealer Training is an online poker dealer school offered by the Atlanta Poker Club. Here at the APC, we developed this course to train our own dealers for our pub poker league. We likewise didn’t have the time or money to send our volunteer dealers out to get trained at a brick-and-mortar school. Our solution was to create our own course to get our dealers trained up quickly to professional capacity. We have dozens of certified poker dealers helping out with our league now.
And then we thought to ourselves, “Why not make this resource available to hopeful dealers everywhere?” If you enroll in our Dealer Training course, you pay a low one-time fee for access, and you get to study from the comfort of your own home. Our online course walks you through everything you need to know to be a successful poker dealer.
Learn How to Deal Poker Like a Pro
Why do you want to learn to deal poker? Our product is aimed at several different audiences. Let’s talk about how you can benefit from our poker dealer course, no matter where you fit into the picture.
Poker League Owners and Managers
If you run a bar poker league like we do, you know that your league cannot survive without professionally trained dealers. The dealers are an integral part of the poker experience, and help you to ensure that players are enjoying a quality game that is both fun and fair. You can purchase our course to assist you in training your own dealers for your local league.
Poker Dealer
If you are a poker dealer without professional training and want to up your game, this is the ideal way to do it. Or maybe you are a prospective dealer with no experience. No matter where you are on the learning curve, the Poker Dealer School can get you up to speed. In no time, you’ll be able to deal with the best of them.
Poker Player
As a poker player, one of the best ways you can increase your edge at the table is by learning how to deal poker. This gives you an inside insight into the game and allows you to view it from a different angle than your opponents. If you become trained as a dealer, you will have a chance to perform better than your opponents and win more games. Whether you are playing professionally or you are a dedicated amateur who just loves the game, you can benefit from our dealer course.
What’s Inside?
What do you get when you purchase Dealer Training? Dealer Training includes eight chapters along with dealer training slideshows and videos. Here are the modules included in the course:
- Chapter 1: Introduction. Here we’ll talk about the state of dealing and poker, why we created the course and who can benefit from it, and discuss an overview of the course objectives and what you’ll learn along the way.
- Chapter 2: Standards. We’ll teach you about the anatomy of a card, deck, and table so that you know exactly what you’re working with. Then we’ll get on to grips and positions.
- Chapter 3: Mechanics. Now we start getting into the meat of the course. You’ll learn how to prep the deck and shuffle and deal the cards and what to do when it’s time for the showdown.
- Chapter 4: Techniques. Here you’ll learn about tasks like cutting chips which you will perform during the game.
- Chapter 5: Responsibilities. In this section we’ll teach you about your responsibilities during the game as far as controlling the game and pacing it, and what you need to do in-hand and between hands. You’ll learn in detail how to deal with player bets and other aspects of the game. We’ll also tell you what errors to avoid.
- Chapter 6: The Process. Here we teach you the 42-step process from start to finish which you as the dealer need to carry out to execute a hand of poker.
- Chapter 7: Practice. This section will offer up a series of exercises you can use to practice what you’ve learned by putting your knowledge to work. This is the only way you will ultimately learn how to deal poker. You can start out by practicing with a friend, and when you are ready for an audition, you can proceed to the next section.
- Chapter 8: Resources. This is where we’ll tell you how you can start dealing poker in real life. A lot of students get started dealing with a poker league like the APC. Many dealers go on to work professionally in casinos. Others become tournament directors and make money that way.
Our course has plenty of helpful images included, but we also have a series of slideshows to help you learn. These slides show you each process step by step so that you can visually see what is going on as you are reading the instructions in each section. Our videos allow you to see the steps in action and performed by a professional dealer. This can be very helpful not only for understanding each process, but also for getting down the timing.
Even if you have relatively little experience with poker and no experience with dealing, our course is all you need to learn how to start dealing like a pro. You might go on to deal with your local poker league, or you might become a professional casino floor dealer. If you are a player and you do not know how to deal, you will gain a new edge by taking our course. And if you own a league, this is the perfect tool to distribute to your own dealers. Your dealers are one of the primary ingredients in your league’s recipe of success. Give them the tools to do well, and you empower the entire league to succeed.
A poker dealer distributes cards to players and manages the action at a poker table.
Professional dealers[edit]
Any casino with a poker room must hire a staff of dealers. Casinos generally pay dealers minimum wage. However, a dealer's primary source of income is not salary, but tips from players. Tip income may be substantial for dealers who can deal hands quickly and efficiently. (In some countries e.g., in Sweden, where all the casinos are owned by the state, Dealers and other casino personnel may not accept tips from players. This rule is complied with strictly.)
To become employable by a casino, applicants without prior experience are typically required to complete a 4-6 week training program at a dealing school. Dealing in a casino may require working late hours and remaining seated for long periods of time. Dealers also commonly work holidays, since these are especially busy days for casinos. Having to deal with difficult individuals may be another drawback to dealing at a casino—some players are abusive to dealers.
Major poker tournaments also hire dealers. For a given tournament stop, the tournament coordinator will hire dealers on contract for the duration of the tournament, which may be a few days to a few weeks. Room and board may or may not be provided by the tournament management; the dealer is typically responsible for his own travel expenses.
Mechanics of dealing[edit]
Dealers must be proficient in shuffling the deck, distributing the cards to the players, and, if required by the game being dealt, turning up the community cards in the center of the table. There are two methods of distributing the cards, 'American'-style and 'European'-style.
Shuffling[edit]
To shuffle the cards, the dealer follows a sequence defined by the casino. First all cards are spread out on the table and pushed around randomly. This is called 'scrambling' or 'washing' the cards. Then the cards are collected and squared into a deck. At this point a typical shuffling sequence might be: riffle, riffle, box, riffle. Professional dealers always keep both halves of the deck very low to the table while shuffling. Some casinos have automatic shufflers built into the table that shuffle a different deck of cards while the previous hand is being played, which speeds up the game.
Finally, a cut card is placed on the table and the deck is cut onto the card. The cut card is held on the bottom of the deck for the entire hand, to keep the bottom card from being exposed.
American-style dealing[edit]
In American-style dealing, the deck is held in one hand, and the dealer uses the thumb of their deck hand to slide the top card of the deck toward their pitching hand. The pitching hand clasps the card between the thumb and index finger while at the same time the mid-point of the card touches the face (nail) of the middle finger. It is the extension of the middle finger that 'pitches' the card off the top of the deck and a 'whoosh' should be heard as each card exits the top of the deck.
The ability to pitch cards accurately is critical, since the cards must be delivered in a way that players at the table can not see the undersides of the cards.
European-style dealing[edit]
European-style dealers touch only the top of each card being dealt. The card is pushed off the top of the deck to the table surface in front of the dealer. The dealer then propels the card toward the recipient, usually imparting some spin to the card to encourage sliding.
Burning and turning[edit]
Before dealing a community card, the top card off the deck is burned, or discarded. The rationale for burning is that the top card on the deck is visible to players during the previous betting round, so that a cheat might be able to spot a mark on the top card and therefore gain an advantage on his opponents.
When burning, the deck must be held low and the burn card kept level with the table surface. Casinos watch carefully to make sure a dealer does not 'flash', or inadvertently expose, the burn cards to players at the table.
In flop games, the three community cards comprising the flop are turned up simultaneously, never one at a time.
Responsibilities during a hand[edit]
Dealers control the action during a hand. This may include prodding players to act, verbally announcing actions of players to the rest of the table, and correcting players who act out of turn.
Dealers also must manage the pot. The dealer must verify the amount of bets and raises by players, collect folded hands, maintain side pots, and read players' hands at showdown to identify the winner or winners. In games with a rake, the dealer also must keep track of the amount of money in the pot and remove the appropriate amount for the house.
At times the dealer needs to communicate with the floor, or other casino staff. Some casinos equip the dealers with a headset or walkie-talkie for this purpose, while in other casinos the dealer must shout over the ambient noise. The following table shows some common calls a dealer may make, and their meanings:
Professional Poker School
| Call | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 'Floor' or 'Decision' | Requests the floor manager to come to resolve a dispute. |
| 'Seat open' | Announces that a player has left the game and a seat is now available. |
| 'Player in' | Notifies the floor or brush that a vacant seat has been filled. |
| 'Players checks' | Requests a chip runner to retrieve chips for a player. |
| 'Fill' | Requests a chip runner to bring chips to fill the dealer tray. This tray must be kept full of low denomination chips in a high limit game, so that change may be made in the pot so that the rake may be taken out. |
| 'Set up' | Requests replacement decks be brought to the table. |
| 'Pick up' | For cash games, used when an absent player's chips should be removed from the table to free the seat. Also, for single-table satellites, used to request the staff to come collect the cash entry fees from the table. |
| 'Playover' | Alerts the floor that a new player will be playing in a seat taken by an absent player, until the absent player returns. Usually a 'playover box' or some other object is used to separate the seated player's money and chips from those of the person playing over. |
| 'Winner' | Used in single-table satellites to announce that the game has completed and the prize is to be paid. |
| 'Brush' | Calls the floor to deal with a game participation problem, for example if a game must be broken due to insufficient players. |
| 'Service' or 'Cocktails' | Alerts the floor that a player wants a beverage and/or food. |
Online dealing[edit]
Online poker sites use Random number generation (RNGs) when dealing cards. A successful RNG distributes cards in an unpredictable and random way.
See also[edit]
Footnotes[edit]
References[edit]
- Shulman, Barry (2001-06-22). 'Dealer Compensation'. Card Player Magazine.
- Shulman, Barry (2002-03-29). 'Dealer Tipping and Economics'. Card Player Magazine.