News / Dave Allan / 10 July 2009 / Leave a comment

With a few horror stories coming out of the WSOP, including a dealer having his hand broken by a disgruntled punter, it seems a good time to look at etiquette around dealers.

The vast majority of poker players treat dealers well, but a small minority seem to constantly go out of their way to bully or abuse dealers - something which can frequently make both the dealer and players feel very uncomfortable.

As illustrated in the discussion between genius and madness previously, at the two extreme poles of poker ability making accurate reads on your opponent is extremely difficult. When you cannot rely on reads, most of the time you will have to rely on the strength of your hand. Against players who have very little idea what they are doing, your best policy is to simply let their near total ignorance of relative hand strength pay you off.

When you remove the ability to bluff from poker - which is nearly always the case against the very worst players - all you have left is to try and constantly extra the maximum possible value from your hands. Usually this is relatively easy, as most very bad players are inherently curious about the game, and keen to see how each hand is being played. As a result, they tend to turn into massive calling stations, happily throwing chips in the pot over and over again with the worse hand.

There is also a genre of total amateur who seems to play a sort of reverse of this style. Instead of calling every possible bet, they become nervous and timid, and start folding nearly every hand regardless of the action. These players can simply be bulldozed by unending aggression, as their constant folding allows a skilled player to steal their blinds and antes with near total impunity.

Dealing with total amateurs can be an annoying, frustrating, often hilarious and usually highly profitable way of playing poker. Many quite solid players seem to keep playing against very bad players as if they are like the quite good regulars they are used too, which is a huge mistake, and over the long run they miss out on a huge amount of value.