{"id":1883,"date":"2016-05-11T16:09:21","date_gmt":"2016-05-11T23:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beyondnumbers.lvablog.com\/?p=435"},"modified":"2016-07-27T18:55:47","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T01:55:47","slug":"tells-dealer-toke-hustling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/tells-dealer-toke-hustling\/","title":{"rendered":"Tells: Dealer Toke Hustling"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a session playing with rookies, I like to ask, “What did you think of those dealers?” or “Who was your favorite employee?” Heat management is one of the most important aspects of the game, and sizing up the personnel is the key to heat management. “Bullet” and I tend to have identical assessments of the personnel, but the rookies often reach different conclusions. Rookies don’t realize that some of the apparently friendly interaction is nothing more than incessant toke hustling, and that grates on veterans, even those who are generous tokers (which Bullet certainly is, and I’m far from the cheapest myself).It occurs to me that some of the hustling goes unnoticed, because the rookies just don’t have a normal frame of reference, and they are too overwhelmed with other things to notice some of the tells of dealer toke hustling. If you’re new to the game, study these tells and then look for them in some of your regular dealers. We’ll start with the beginning of the “social” interaction and proceed through to the end.<\/p>\n

When you first arrive at the table, or the dealer does, does she ask, “How’s it going? Any luck?” Seems innocent enough, but it’s really just the start of her process of establishing toke expectations. She will apply the lesser of two standards: (1) Are you winning for the day, or the trip, or (2) If losing, did you recover some of your loss during her time at the table? If the answer to either question is Yes, then she will expect tokes, lots and lots of tokes.<\/p>\n

Since this stage is all about managing expectations, you have to tell her that you’re still chasing your losses, if not for this sitting, then for the trip. Some dealers will then get specific, especially if you have your chips neatly arranged in even stacks the way some card counters do, by asking exactly how much you’re in (buy-in), or how much you’re down. While some rookies take this as a supportive gesture indicating that the dealer is emotionally involved in the quest to get even, in reality this is nothing more than the dealer’s attempt to determine exactly when your “I’m-trying-to-get-even” excuse will be void, at which point she will expect tips immediately, if not slightly before you actually get even. So, you should keep some of your stacks messy, not give a precise number (tell her you’re down “a few thousand”), and go south with chips constantly, so that your chase is never-ending.<\/p>\n

When you buy in, the toke hustler will begin the process of maintaining your inventory of toke chips. She will give you a bunch of white chips, pretending she’s giving them to you to play the bonus bet, which most players do, but the bonus is just giving her the perfect rationalization to do what she wanted to do, which is to give you white chips when you buy in. She considers those chips to be dual purpose\u2014they are primarily for toking, but you could bet the bonus with them, too.<\/p>\n

Also, bonus bets go hand in hand with toke expectations. Many dealers will “politely” remind you to bet the bonus, and exhort you to bet the Pair Plus in Three Card Poker, the Trips in Ultimate Texas Hold’em, the Aces Up in Four Card Poker, and so on. The reason they jam those bets down your throat is that those high-odds payoffs will generate tokes. Every Straight on the Pair Plus is a tokable event. Indeed, the “customary” toke is any Straight, and a good toker will toke on Flushes, and any other kind of lucky hand (like beating a Q73 with a Q74), or streak of hands, or any winning hand on a day ending in “y”! They don’t like the grinding up style of APs who win a lot by making large wagers and receiving even-odds payoffs.<\/p>\n

As you win, the hustler will try to pay you off to maintain your toke inventory. If you’ve been betting red while toking white, watch what happens when you run out of white. Without asking, the hustler will pay your $10 Ante with a red chip and five white chips. It’s even more egregious when a black and purple bettor is paid $500 including $50 in red, or even worse, with four black and four green. Rookies are pretty oblivious to what the standard breakdown should be on various buy-in and payoff amounts.<\/p>\n

A great test is to see what happens when you bet $20, with a $1 toke, with no visible chips left, and then color down one green chip in order to double down. The hustler will give you four red and five white, and might even place the double down chips for you, even the extra white one. Obviously Miss Manners would say that the polite dealer procedure is to color down the quarter down to five red, push them to the player, and then allow the player to color one of those red down to white. You will even notice a polite dealer hesitate ever so slightly after she grabs four red from the rack, realizing that giving you five red is the polite thing to do, though she wants to give you some white. I once had a quarter bet and $1 toke at Circus Circus, and the dealer called out “Doubling for less!” when I put down an extra quarter to double down without the accompanying white chip to double down for the dealer.<\/p>\n

The Pause. After you win a big hand or split and double down, the hustler will hesitate slightly before dealing the next hand. She is waiting for you to put up a toke bet. If she gets called out on it (for instance, if you give her that look like, “What are you waiting for?”), then she will pass it off that she wanted to make sure your bets were set, because it looked like you were adjusting them, and we wouldn’t want to mess up the mo-jo by screwing up the bets.<\/p>\n

Over the course of play, some dealers will give you advice on playing a hand, making a bonus bet, or making a change in bet size (usually encouragement to bet more). This is the free-roll hustle. If the advice doesn’t work out, she’ll make an excuse or say nothing. The incident will be forgotten. If you win, she will now remind you ’til the end of time how her advice made you some extra money. So try to avoid dealer advice, or control it yourself by asking for it only when it suits your needs. Don’t let the dealer shake the dice in pai gow; you’ll get hustled if she shakes you a winner.<\/p>\n

After all that, watch out for the “sudden, inexplicable” grumpiness that sets in late in a session. I use the quotation marks only for the rookies, to whom the mood shift is bizarre. As you gain experience watching for the tells, you’ll be surprised how often the grumpiness is simply the expression of disappointment when you failed to meet toke expectations after winning a big hand or reaching a certain win level.<\/p>\n

Try not to cave in to any of this toke hustling. If you give a begging dog food at the dinner table, what happens next time? As with dogs, the problem is that even if you employ rigid discipline, your kids or spouse might sneak the dog some food from the dinner table, so the dog’s begging behavior is reinforced. Of course, the behavior is a bit more tolerable if the dog is cute.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"youtube\"<\/a>\"instagram\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a session playing with rookies, I like to ask, “What did you think of those dealers?” or “Who was your favorite employee?” Heat management is one of the most important aspects of the game, and sizing up the personnel is the key to heat management. “Bullet” and I tend to have identical assessments of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[29,2,3,686,7,1,206,15,687],"tags":[935,240,336,335,918,344,933,54,343,342,898,899,340,937,341,930,927,541,332,921,931,338,928,457,925,934,333,339,413,932,558,922,248,331,924,926,330,183,929,334,337,936],"yoast_head":"\nTells: Dealer Toke Hustling - Gambling With An Edge<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/gambling-with-an-edge\/tells-dealer-toke-hustling\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tells: Dealer Toke Hustling - 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