Should You Tip Your Blackjack Dealer?

hey guys this is colin from blackjack apprenticeship now one of the most heated topics i've ever had to be a part of as an advantage player is tipping some card counters say you should never tip from your bankroll your hard earned money others say it's our civic duty to tip the dealers now i wasn't going to post this on youtube this is actually a video for a paid video course but i thought screw it let's get the information out there people can learn and you can let me know in the comments below how heated you are on this topic and what you think is the right way to approach this [Music] hey guys this is colin and i want to take some time and talk about tipping and card counting now before i even get into this just take a minute and see what you're feeling even before i talk about this because in my experience this can be one of the most emotionally charged topics that i've ever discussed i've never seen people get into as as lengthy and heated of debates as over this topic in card counting now some people see tipping as part of their civic duty as a card counter other card carriers see it as one of the worst uses of their hard earned money i remember tommy hyland saying one time something to the effect of these casinos are fleecing players out of their money and then on top of that expecting those players to pay for their dealers because these greedy casinos are too cheap to pay the dealers more than minimum wage and i'd have to say he kind of has a point so while some aps would say you've got a tip and other aps would say never tip i would say both of those approaches are a bit reductionistic and you know whatever you're feeling if you're finding that you're having an extreme emotional reaction to this let's step back from it and try to approach this topic like aps which means we're going to approach this topic as a business decision so if we're going to approach tipping as a business decision as card counters i really think there's three things we need to consider the first is what is your ev and i mean your realistic ev not your best case scenario ev but what are you actually generating when you consider rounds per hour any mistakes you might make and how you're genuinely playing in the casino so that will tell us okay that is what our time in the casino is worth every hour the second is how much of that ev are we willing to give up through tipping so i i've tried for years to come up with an analogy this is the best one i've got if you've got a better one let me know what if i was paid to be a food critic so i get paid let's say i get paid pretty well like a hundred dollars per meal that i review i go to the restaurant and these are high-end places where you know when it's all said and done between appetizer main course dessert and any drinks i have while i'm reviewing this food it comes to 500 for the tab and of course the tab is covered by the magazine or whoever but they say look you know any tip that's got to come out of your pocket well am i willing to give a 20 tip because that would be 100 if i were doing that i make no money so then you say well no i can't do 20 i'll do 10 am i willing to give up half of my pay to to do that um maybe maybe i am maybe i just say you know i'm willing to do this reviewing food for 50 an hour because i want to tip 50 an hour knowing this is my job this isn't me going out with uh with my friends for fun this is me getting paid to be in here during this time and it helps you know yeah it helps me out helps my company or whatever or would i say you know look i would never buy a 500 meal myself much less multiple every day as a food critic but i don't want to you know give them nothing or else they might be upset with me so maybe i give you know five dollars ten dollars uh for every meal i review well is is that going to work you know you've got to decide how much if your ev is a hundred dollars an hour how much are you willing to give back just to not feel bad about what you're doing or just to try to make make that dealer happy now we've talked about how much eevee we're generating and then how much we're willing to give back but that's simply give back you know just because we feel like we should be tipping now the third thing we need to talk about is what are you getting out of tipping if we're talking about a business a business doesn't just say how much do i make and how much am i just going to give away or if they're going to give it away it's going to be to something they care about maybe what you really care about is dealers getting fair wages maybe you know like me you give your money to other causes that you care about even more but let's talk about just the the business impact of tipping now in all of my years doing this either playing blackjack or running teams or training others i've really only thought of three reasons for tipping the first of which is to make dealers happy so the question is well how much money would it take to make them happy let's say that for generating 100 bucks an hour maybe your average bet is a couple hundred dollars you know uh two spots of 102 spots of 200 you're gonna need at least that uh for your big bets to generate a hundred dollars an hour of ev well if you're doing that you're going to be having swings in the couple thousand dollars you know in a session you're gonna win or lose a few thousand dollars if you win a few thousand dollars how much are you gonna need to tip for that dealer to be happy or let's just say in one session with a dealer and you're having rounds where you're winning a thousand dollars in a shoe well how much are they gonna expect you know if you're making a hundred dollars an hour and you say well i'll tip ten percent is ten dollars an hour not not per dealer if there's three three dealers in an hour then it would be three dollars per dealer an hour three times an hour is that gonna make them happy in my experience it's not it's actually probably gonna offend them more if you win a thousand dollars and say hey thanks so much here's three dollars i've run teams where we're betting up to two spots of three thousand or thirty five hundred dollars we're having seven thousand dollar rounds of blackjack and yeah maybe the ev for that was five hundred or a thousand dollars an hour but if you're paying seven thousand dollars and you win twenty thousand dollars in a shoe and you give them a hundred dollars they're not going to be happy about that so i would say to make dealers happy is probably the weakest argument as far as a business decision to tip the second business decision of why you might tip is to improve your playing conditions and there's really two ways that i've ever seen this the first is to get better deck penetration and you know i first read about this from ian anderson and how he would you know kind of really work with the dealer and and he had his 52 card cut or you know kind of coax the dealer into giving him better deck penetration now i've tried that and at times i've even had it work but here's my caution you got to be really careful that it's actually producing not only the effect the desired effect but enough so that your tip is worth it so if you tip ten dollars how much better deck penetration are you gonna need to not only make up for that ten dollars but more than that because if you're getting an extra ten dollars an ev but you're giving ten dollars to give it you know you're risking ten dollars to hope to generate an extra ten so you know run the numbers on it be careful that you're not just saying hey i think they gave me a better deck penetration and you start hemorrhaging tip money to the dealer the other way it can improve your conditions is through better rounds per hour if you can get a dealer to deal much faster by encouraging them with a tip then you can generate a lot more eevee but again you've got to be sure maybe just asking i found that just telling a dealer hey deal as fast as you want and i'll do my best to keep up that gets them to deal faster you don't want to be giving money hoping it's going to generate more ev and then it backfires you get no better ev or you're only getting as much more ev as as you're handing the dealer money otherwise it's not really a very good business decision the third business decision why you may decide to tip is for cover so again you've got to decide if the cost is worth the benefit and don't just try to make this up on the fly use software to figure out hey how much am i generating per hour how much do i think it's going to buy me in terms of how much longer i'll last and how much is it going to cost you know if you're paying 20 an hour in tips are you going to for sure last at least 20 longer at this casino you know i would say if you're only lasting 20 longer and giving away 20 then you know that's not a very good deal you got to last considerably longer now if you're doing two days in vegas and it's going to be kind of hit and run why would you tip that that's not really buying you more time just as far as a business decision if however you're going to be in an area maybe it's your local shop and you know you say hey i want to drag this out as long as i can calculate the cost what you expect the reward to be and decide how tipping might play into that there have been places and times where having a good rapport you know seemed to be worth it and i really calculated and tracked how much i was tipping and determined you know this place it's worth it for this reason there's a really great podcast with uh the phoenix where he beat the side bet for 300 000 and he calculated a very elaborate way of making sure that he tipped because it was a local it was a california card room where the pit bosses the dealers they were all the same and they all shared the tips and so he tipped a certain amount to keep them happy but he calculated you know that he didn't tip more than it really what fit into his business plan now as far as tipping as part of your business plan i would say this in my estimation for every card counter who is making themselves more money with tipping there are 10 or 20 card counters who are actually at a net negative for tipping now that goes back to those previous reasons maybe you still decide to tip just because it makes the dealer happy and that makes your time at the casino feel better just be aware you're not making a good business decision you might be making a good personal decision but we want to think through this like aps to finish this off i want to share just a few tips on tipping the first of which is if you are going to tip a dealer my recommendation is to tip at the end of their time right when the other dealer is showing up there are two reasons for this first off if you tip right when the dealer shows up at the table they're going to expect you to keep tipping the rest of the time that they're there i don't know if you've ever had that where the dealer shows up firsthand and they're trying to work the crowd they're working the table they're being extra charismatic you tip them and like oh thanks so much and they expect that train to just keep right right in and rolling and you know for you to be tipping every couple hands and if you tip once and then you don't for 20 minutes and then the next dealer shows up the dealer dealer's not going to be happy with you he's going to you know be kind of annoyed the other reason why you would want tip at the end is that then the other dealer that's coming in uh you know to replace they're going to see that tip and they might be more inclined to you know be amicable to what you're asking for which might be better deck penetration more rounds per hour if they saw that you tipped the last dealer they know there's something to work for the other dealer you know is at the end of their shift if they're being rewarded for what they did the last 20 minutes then they're happy with you and the next guy is gonna see hey you know maybe maybe if he's asking for me to deal a little faster to cut a little bit thinner uh it's gonna be worth it because he's gonna reward me this is a guy i wanna keep happy at the table so another tip i got this from ian anderson's burning the tables in las vegas and this is to put your bet actually on top or the tip on top of your bet so let's say i'm paying 50 then you put a 5 chip on top for the dealer and you've got to say something so the dealer knows that this is for them to say hey you know hey thanks for dealing a little faster for me i'm having a good time this five dollars is for you let's win a few hands and then if you if you lose you lose the whole thing uh but they know that that you tipped for them and you can say oh shoot sorry man i tried but if you win what happens is when they pay it out they pay it out like this you toss the dealer the five bucks and you keep it riding and so if you happen to win a few hands in a row then it feels to the dealer like you you know bet for them multiple times even though it costs you only the one five dollar bet if you bet five dollars in front you know win or lose you're done betting for them after the five dollars so that's a minor tip that i thought was creative and i pretty much exclusively tipped the dealer that way but you gotta make sure you let them know hey this five dollars is for you because if you don't say anything then they don't know that you are actually tipping for them and you know i try to say something that ties it back to positive reinforcement hey thanks for cutting it thin i always do well at the end of the shoe this five dollars is for you or thanks for dealing a bit faster something like that also when i'm tipping on top of my bet i tend to do it during positive uh true counts so that they are actually rooting for me when you know when it's positive ev situations rather than the dealer being frustrated like hey who is this moneybags bet and all this money betting a couple hundred bucks and i put five dollars say hey this five bucks is for you let's both win a few hands then they're actually rooting for me when i'm betting more my final tip on tipping is to track it in the same way we want to track our session results our ev our actual value our profits and losses our time in casinos we should also be tracking our tipping so that we can look back and say is this worth it i know joe 748 he said at a boot camp that if you would have tipped 25 dollars a session it would have been you know something like a hundred thousand dollars or some ridiculous amount of money he was able to say hey look i saved a hundred thousand dollars or someone that does tip like the phoenix and he says yes over my career i tipped thirty thousand dollars and i determined that ten percent of the three hundred thousand i made was worth it because they let me play a lot longer whatever it is just track your results deal with reality and you can thank me later to finish this video off i wanted to share this quote from semi-pro semi-pro is a dealer turned full-time card counter and uh as of the filming of this video she still does some advantage play but this is what she said and i thought it was really interesting this was a quote in the interview i did with her in my book she said it's important to realize this about the dealers who are openly angry at you for not tipping you can't afford to buy them the margins are too small even if you could theoretically afford to buy them it still wouldn't be enough they'd likely be angry with or without the money the reality is we're gonna deal with dealers that don't like us other players that don't like us and these dealers you know a lot of them they don't like their job they're doing it for one reason and that's the money but they have to stand on their feet all day deal with people blaming them for them losing all their money and you know the only thing that makes them a little bit happy is when you're handing them your money but what she's saying is she's been around this culture and yeah they might smile at the moment then they go back to the break room and they complain about you you know i wouldn't say tipping to make the dealers happy is very effective but whatever you can decide for yourself just thought that was an interesting quote that's it on tipping you guys can blow up the comments below and tell me why i'm wrong or why you're right or why i'm right and you're wrong or whatever it is and if you do have questions about this leave leave a question below and we'll take it from there

Channel: Blackjack Apprenticeship

Views: 518,772

Keywords: Blackjack, blackjack apprenticeship, blackjack apprentice, colin jones, how to count cards, blackjack strategy, beat blackjack, card counting blackjack, card counting, Tipping, casino

Id: StPJFox5GeA

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020