Dealing in Home Poker Games

This section covers information on:

  • How to handle card dealing at your poker game.
  • Having a card dealer, it’s advantages, and how to find one.
  • How to handle card misdeals at your poker games.

How to Handle Dealing at House Poker Games:

There are different ways you can handle dealing at a house poker tournament/cash game:

  • The most common way is for each person to deal once they are the dealer at the table. The player to the right of dealer shuffles, and the player to the left cuts the shuffled deck. This is a practical way to handle dealing at your game but it’s not ideal. Some layers don’t know how to deal and dealing distracts the player if he is in a hand himself. It also makes the game slower, and also more
    misdeals at each game.
  • You can have one person deal the whole time and it can rotate at different game nights. So for example if John is dealing for tonight’s game, Anthony will deal for next week’s and it passes on to the next player. Also players who are slower on dealing can have the shuffling task each time and they can rotate too.
  • You can have everyone pay a little more to get in the game – for instance $30+4 in a tournament – and use that money to pay one of your buddies or girlfriends to deal as a dedicated dealer. That way your game will be more organized and she/he will be happy dealing for you too. If you have 16 people at your table that’s over $50 for the dealer.

Advantages of Having a Dedicated Dealer

  • Hands are dealt much faster.
  • There is less confusion in main and side pots.
  • Only one person decides when issues rise.
  • Dealing with cheating won’t be a problem since the dealer doesn’t play him/her self.
  • Players can focus more on their games instead of dealing and playing at the same time.

Players can also tip a dealer in a cash poker game. In a $1/$2 cash game tips can easily add up to over $15 an hour. If you are playing a poker tournament, you can collect money from each player to pay the dealers. For example you can host a $20+4 tournament and the $4 would go to the dealer/s.

Dealing with misdeals

If in the process of dealing the hole cards, one card flips up, keep dealing as if that card had not flipped. At the end of dealing, the flipped up card would be the burned card which everyone gets to see. The player whose card was flipped would get the actual burned card.