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4 Reasons Your Poker League Needs Great Poker Dealers

If you are in charge of a bar poker league or you are working on setting one up, one of your tasks is to staff your league with the best poker dealers you can find. Maybe you already have some well-trained candidates lined up for the job. But maybe you don’t live in Reno or Vegas, and you do not have a huge candidate pool of fully trained dealers lined up for the job. Or perhaps you have friends in the community who want to get on board, but do not yet have the training. It is essential that your poker league have highly trained poker dealers. Here are 4 great reasons.

1. Skillful dealers run games smoothly.

The more skilled your dealer is, the fewer conflicts and issues will arise during your poker league games. Good dealers know the ins and outs of the game perfectly and can deal cards in their sleep. When you have highly trained dealers working with your league, games progress smoothly, and outcomes are always clear and judged fairly. When your dealers can manage each of your games individually, that creates less work for you to do as the tournament director—and you will already have plenty of it just planning the events.

2. Great dealers can also keep your events on schedule.

When you run a poker event, you need to be thinking about timing. The event venues you work with all have hours to keep, and the participants in your games have busy schedules of their own. You want your games to run in a timely fashion so that event venue owners and players are not inconvenienced. Trained dealers who know the 42-step dealing process are able to run through all the steps of the game quickly and efficiently. Amateur dealers may deal games haltingly and with lots of stops and starts. These can accumulate into inconveniences for everybody.

3. Facilitate Communication

During your events, your dealers will regularly communicate with other league staff members as well as workers at the venue. While you and your tournament directors will likely be doing most of the work when it comes to running the events, your dealers are next in the line of responsibility. It is up to them to be able to interact well with your players throughout the evening and to work well with the rest of the staff.

4. Manage the Pot

Good dealers are not only in charge of dealing the cards and controlling the game, but also keeping track of the pot, including all bets and raises. The dealer needs to keep track of how many chips are in the pot at any one time and set aside the winnings for the house. This is an accounting task, and it is essential that you have dealers who can get it right.

Learning to deal poker today is essentially the same as it was before the poker boom in 2003. You have to learn the same techniques, mechanics, and rules. Fortunately today it is much easier to find resources to help you learn how to deal Texas Hold ‘em and any other poker games you run in your league. How did we train our own dealers at the Atlanta Poker Club? We came up with our own online Dealer Training program for just this purpose. We have a highly successful bar poker league, and it is largely in part to the expertise of our dealers. The same program which worked for us can work for you to train your own dealers!