How much does being a poker dealer help your game?

I'm thinking about applying for jobs to be a poker dealer in a casino.
I would imagine it would help your game to some extent, and I'm jobless at the moment.
However the pays terrible and the working hours pretty undesirable.
Has anyone else had any experience of what its like being a dealer?

I'm actually curious about this as well. I'm sure the tips are good, so I'm interested to see what people with experience say.

i had a friend that worked as a dealer for awhile and he said it helped his game alot. hope it works for you gl. let us know how it goes.

ive herd sum ppl tlk bout this in past threads that as they are dealers they can pick up sum pretty good reads on ppl while dealing whihc can b handy if u play alot of live poker.
plus if u start out as a dealer then try work ur way up to poker host or the pit boss

GL witht htis mate, hope it works out 4 ya.

Scotty Nguyen and others started by being dealers. It's a cheap way to observe what winning/losing players do, how people tend to act in specific situations, etc. So yeah, I think it can really help your game.

Heck, I watch the cash games before my tournament starts and pick up things on people. A few weeks ago, one guy had a habit of forecasting that he would fold by holding his cards a certain way. Several times I saw him in pots with people, and they'd check it down. I kept thinking "just raise him with anything because he wants to fold!" I'm sure dealers go through that a lot in their heads.

Where I live there aern't many casinos so it might not be that easy to get a job there now in the recession when I've never worked there before but I've decided I'll see if I can.

Seems I'm the first dealer to reply here.

I get paid pretty well for dealing. But I work for an events company that does corporate functions and private tournaments, not a casino, and they look after us really well. I work with a lot of ex-casino staff though and they're almost all glad not to be working in casinos any more.

Either way (casino or private) though, the hours can be pretty lousy.

Then there's the drunks and douchebags you have to deal with. I just came in from a really crappy shift, so maybe I'm bitter on that point at the moment. But you really have to have patience. There's a fair bit of pressure working in a casino too. You have to track pots and calculate rake, plus learn the mechanics of shuffling, pitching and chip handling (the last two particularly aren't as easy as they look).

As to whether it makes you a better player... meh, I don't think so. Maybe you get some practice reading people, but most of the time you'll be too busy actually running the game to watch closely. For my money, I think you'd get a lot more value from actually playing say four hours a day (either live or online) than you would from dealing eight hours a day. If I weren't a dealer, but I'd still done the same amount of reading and playing, I think my game would be pretty much the same.

Anywho, Cliff notes:

Become a dealer because it's something you really WANT to do - not because you think it'll make you a better poker player or because you've got nothing better to do. Because it won't really improve your game that much, and the negatives will fast outweigh the positives if you don't actually enjoy the job.

My understanding is that the base pay is unimpressive, but dealers make most of their money in tips. Given that it is pretty normal to get tipped nearly every single hand, that can add up. If a dealer is particularly friendly and fun, the tips tend to be bigger, especially at the tables where the players want to have a fun time. Also, in time, you will get to know the regulars, and if they like you, they will tip more.

As to improving your game, it ought to. You should be able to improve your reading skills in general. Not only are you not in the hand (and therefore not focussed on cards), you have the best seat from which to look at people. If you have also read widely about physical tells, you will have a base from which to evaluate how pervasive certain tells are.

You should also be able to learn to get a sense of the type of table it is relatively quickly. This is also a skill when you want to play live poker. You want to be able to pick a table that gives you, with your style of play, the best chance.

Well as stated above.
I beleive dealers not only get a keen knowledge on tells and reads,but also they get a great amount of ppot knowledge and position.
Seeing so many hands on a shift must be really rewarding in alot of aspects to the game.

Taking a different look at the game has always helped me see better ways of winning. Take the job and be happy about it!

Best of luck to you in your new endeavors! I know most of the dealers quite well where I play and some of them say it absolutely has improved their game and allows them to read people better. Others not so much. From my observations I think it has more to do with your own personal abilities: are you observant and can you multi-task well?

I think dealing with people is the toughest part of this job. To tell the truth, I wouldnt do it because of it (drunk men, arguments etc...) Plus I guess it's mainly a nigtly job.

^ this is a great post

I am a dealer in a casino (Seneca Niagara in Niagara Falls, NY) and I absolutely love my job. I don't know why the OP thinks the pay is terrible, I get paid really well.

Dealing will help your game if you are a beginner, but as far as "picking up reads" on the players, you won't notice much. You are focused on running the game and if you focus too much on trying to read players, you will make a mistake dealing. I have players ask me all the time what the flop was last hand or something related to the play of the last hand. I can't answer them simply because I don't remember what the flop was, lol.

Also dealing usually isn't a job you can just fall into. I had to go to dealing school and then wait 2 years before the casino near me was hiring. People usually don't quit around here, as it is one of the best jobs in the area.

I think dealing would help your game from reading/tells to watching different styles of play and putting people on ranges and most important you will see thousands of different players good and bad. You gain playing experience and get paid for the effort.

Where I live dealers aern't allowed to take tips.
They live on minimum wage which is 6 UK pounds an hour equivalent to about 9 or 10 US dollars, and at least one casino I know breaks the law and actually pays less than that.
I've seen a bit about dealer school mentioned on the net just from google searching today but I've never heard anyone mention this before?
As far as I know in the UK the casino just train you from scratch on the job. Why would you be bothered putting in all that effort to train for free just for minimum wage? You might as well just work in a cafe or a supermarket.
How much do you get paid?
I guess I could move to the States and get a dealer's job there if I worked here for a couple of years.

So to summarise so far:

Everybody thinks that working as a dealer will be great for your game and will make you into a sick reader...

...except for the two people who actually do the job and know otherwise.

It can't do your game any harm.

FWIW this is how it works in Australia too - except you don't get a choice in the games you're trained in. The casino takes in batches of new croupiers as they're required, puts them through their own training college and then teaches them the games they need people to work.

So you can't necessarily rock up and say "I want to deal poker" - they'll laugh and say "That's nice, but we need big wheel and baccarat croupiers right now".

No tipping here either. Not entirely sure what the base hourly rate a starting croupier gets, it'll be in the AUD$17-20/hr ballpark though (a bit above minimum wage).

Absolutely correct. But like I said in my initial post above, if you want to become a better poker player then just play poker. You'll get a much better return on your time invested.

Become a dealer because you want to become a dealer, not because you want to become a better player.

i don't know but i'm pretty close to my dealers at my casnio i'm a winning player they all know me pretty good.My favorite one's i let them sweat me all the time they enjoy it so do i.LOL but they stick the neddle in real good when i fold a4 of spades an the flop comes 239 of spades lol keep play a4s to a raise out of postion is what i always say.

I used to be a dealer and really loved the job at the time because the pay was excellent and for the most part I picked my own hours. That's until all my hours were spend locked behind bars.
Oh... dealing cards!?!?!?!.... Ooops.... sorry bout that. Wrong forum.

Even if thats true you stilll need to be earning money in the short term. and I'm not a good enough player yet to earn more money playing than I would as a dealer.

You would assume it would make your game better...but I can tell you for a fact that where I live we have 2 decent sized casinos with both having roughly 25 tables...one is soon to have a new room with 60 tables...my experience playing with the dealers from the opposing casino is that they are all god awful players...they all tend to be overly aggressive which is fine, there are tons of good aggressive players out there....but each and every single one of them is just recklessly aggressive having no concern for what the other player may hold, they have JJ and the board is 6-4-2 and they call a 90 year old rock player's all in who has not played a hand in a cool 2 hours with no consideration whatsoever they may be holding a set. I've never seen the dealers where I play in action since I never go to the other casino but many of the players are close with them and play in the dealer home game and they have told me its basically the same old story, reckless aggressiveness and bad play all around...I wonder if the fact they tend to see more bad beats and suckouts than the average player they have a natural tendency towards over aggressiveness to protect their hands.

And that is the general stereotype, that dealers are overly aggressive players. Out of the 50 some odd dealers at my casino, there may be actually 2-3 winning players. You have to understand that most dealers are not really taking the game seriously when they are playing, just having fun on the other side of the table.

I think it will help alot. Not really with dealing cards and stuff, but being in de middle of the action at a table every single hand. You see alot of players and alot of situations. This way you also see witch things work and don't work the mos of the time.
You also look objective to the game witch is better to study...

if i were you i'd see if they needed a house player.

As far as you heard the pay is not good..... That all depends on where you work, in the United States it is one if the highest unskilled paid jobs (considering the alternatives) because while the base pay may be low, the tips are in general quite good. When I inquired about it out of curiousity a few years ago, people were talking 60K+ USDollars. I do not know where pay has gone since.

As far as improving your game, I would think it would---but over many years of observations, it seems (just in general--not always) that dealers are the worst players. I always salivate when I hear dealers play a game. Of course, there are many dealers who are excellent players as well.

I work with dealers that play all sorts of ways - from nits to maniacs. I've seen enough maniac dealers to know there's at least some grain of truth to the stereotype though.