Week in Review #58 May 10th-16th 2026
My thoughts on the WSOP Dealer Rating System
One of the hardest skills to develop while playing poker is to not allow your judgement to be clouded by your emotion, while also remaining in touch with your intuition. If I am thinking clearly and within a structured framework, I tend to think that I am thinking logically. If I am thinking emotionally, I use that structured framework to rationalize what my emotions want me to do. However, there are times where something just doesn’t feel right. It’s not based on anything rational and it turns out my emotional instincts were right. There were two recent poker news items that I had a strong emotional reaction to, the World Series of Poker announcing the launch of their Dealer Rating System and a conversation about if electronic devices should be banned at the poker table. In my younger days I would have immediately blasted off several takes about the topics du jour, but I decided to give myself a week to let me sort through my thoughts so I can determine which of my thoughts were sound and which were rationalizations that supported my initial emotional reaction.
The first post that caught my attention was about the brand new World Series of Poker Dealer Rating System, which is outlined by Jeff Platt here. I do not regularly play at the WSOP in Vegas, but when I did I remember that the dealers were often amateurish: They were unable to give proper change, they pitched very high, they regularly exposed cards, and they’d occasionally just zone out in the middle of hands. So one might think I’d be in favour of holding these dealers accountable, but my knee jerk reaction to this policy was disgust. This is a bad policy that will turn poker players into narcs and make a stressful, thankless job, even more stressful and thankless for most dealers.
My problem with this solution from the WSOP is they’re misidentifying the real problem here. The problem is not that it’s too hard to tell which dealers are good and which are bad, it’s that the WSOP dealers are not of a high enough quality for reasons that I assume are largely due to: poor training, poor pay, and long hours. I am not sure how much player feedback will fix those structural problems. Instead of rectifying their in house problems of not recruiting, identifying, or training good dealers, the WSOP is enlisting their customers to fill in the gaps.
The WSOP has announced that they will give out $1000 per bracelet event to the top dealers as voted on in the app, which works out to a $100,000 for the whole summer, which is not nothing, but probably represents like a $0.10/hr raise. It’s also only slightly more money than the rake they’ll collect from the $1,500 Razz, which I am going to assume is the tourney that generated the least rake in 2025. I’ll also assume that the $100k they’re handing out is less than however much it cost them to develop the dealer rating system within the WSOP App.
My initial reaction was disgust and I shared that disgust by posting
If self-evaluation and customer feedback is important, it should be something all tournament staff are subject to. If anything, allowing users to critique full time employees feels much more important than focussing on low-level, mostly temporary workers. However poker players and WSOP regulars I know and respect like Martin Jacobson and Jeremy Ausmus gave contrary opinions so I did some ruminating and wondered if I was acting emotionally or logically when I saw this announcement.
As I was ruminating I saw another post that led to a lot of chatter on Poker Twitter, Bob Mather posted about how Apple’s Camera AirPods are in advanced testing and how they might be the perfect device to aid cheaters playing live poker before asking if headphones should or will inevitably be banned while playing poker.
My initial thought to this was not disgust, but fear and anger. They’re not going to take away my beloved phone and headphones when playing live poker, I need it. The thoughts of a hopeless phone addict. Clearly I was thinking emotionally and not logically. I don’t know enough about the specific device mentioned in the Bob Mather tweet and I am not paying Bloomberg $1.99 to find out (please subscribe to Punt of the Day and support independent media), but this will be an issue regardless if the Camera AirPods makes it to market and has the capabilities “advanced testing” indicates they will have. Devices that were once fictional gadgets Q would make for James Bond are everywhere nowadays and are cheap and readily available. I do not think there will be a specific device that will lead to a massive boom in live poker cheating, but there will regularly be new devices that make it to market that will be able to aid cheaters.
I think cheating in live poker using technology that is accessible to most will become pretty easy, but I am much less of a doomer than the first clause of this sentence might make me seem. The reason for that is because there is a big difference between cheating and successfully cheating. There was a successful cheating ring that was discovered a couple of years ago where players left their phones facedown on the rail with their camera recording the dealer’s pitch and someone off site was watching the footage and relaying the cards they saw to the player who had a hidden ear piece implanted so deep in their ear it could only be removed with a magnet. That is why most operators have banned players having their phone on the rail during a hand. I think it’s unlikely that people could successfully steal a large sum of money cheating only using devices you could buy at Best Buy without getting caught. What concerns me much more than Big Tech’s newest offerings are innovations in the cheating space. It’s easy to be one step ahead of people using AirPods or Meta Sunglasses, it’s very hard to be ahead of savvy cheaters looking for every angle and searching for spy-tech to aid them. This is all to say, I think this is a very real problem and it’s possible the best solution is to go against my knee jerk emotional reaction to ban all electronic devices from the table. I just don’t believe that the pre-launch of one consumer device that could be so powerful should be the catalyst for this change. If we were just worried about one device or even one class of device, it would be easy to just ban those specific devices.
The problem here remains that poker is also a customer service business. If the goal was strictly to reduce cheating, they could ban all electronic devices at the table, but that also might cause field sizes to decrease. If they wanted to reduce cheating, they could also say, run criminal background checks on every single person playing a tournament or make every player take a polygraph test swearing they did not cheat. They could prevent people from going to GTO Wizard using the Wi-Fi in the tournament area. The goal is not just to reduce cheating, but to also grow the game and provide a pleasant playing experience for all. To some people being able to listen to music, check your work emails, or order food for dinner break makes playing poker much more enjoyable and you’d need an electronic device for that. Of course there are fewer poker experiences less pleasurable than getting cheated. So operators need to balance making sure customers have a good time, while also protecting game integrity. The easiest way to stop cheating would be a strict ban on all electronics within a poker room, this could also make playing poker difficult for many hobbyist poker players and I really don’t know what the best course of action is. It depends on how the players playing in your poker room feel and if cheating is a prevalent problem in your poker room.
However there is another problem with this push to ban electronics from live poker tournaments: electronics are increasingly becoming a necessary tool to play live poker. Pokerstars, Triton and now the WSOP have apps where you can view the tournament clock, look at people’s stack sizes, and see key hands played throughout the tournament. In the case of the WSOP+ app you can use it to register tournaments and rate dealers. Phones are no longer just a diversion to occupy your attention when you’re card dead, but almost as important as a having ID or cash to buy-in. If you have these apps, you need to alllow phones at the table and once you allow people to have phones at the table, you open up the door for all sorts of potential cheating, headphones or not.
So after a week, where do I stand? I think my first reaction was an emotional one, but one that I stand by, I still hate the Dealer Rating System. The second one was an emotional reaction akin to a toddler being told they can’t have candy, but still … can we not have candy in this miserable world? I want my phone and my headphones and my distractions. Playing poker for 12 hours for 14 straight days is hard, give me my dopamine drip. So ultimately, I’m going to sit on the fence here and say, no electronics ban and I think taking phones away when people get deep in tournaments is a good middle ground… for now.
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium Subscribers are given access to a Google Drive folder where they will also be able to download the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries. This week I uploaded
A PIO sim using the 1k/1.5k blind level for POTD #279
A PIO sim using specific PF adjusting to the three bet size for POTD #280
A PIO sim looking at a 250 deep 3BP for POTD #281
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included in the main post. Today, I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #281, where I wrote about what to do when you don’t know what to do.
POTD #281 onemorething
I normally don’t mind giving premium subscribers real names when I tell stories, but since this is not my story, I will keep them anonymized. In a High Roller in Monaco in 2022 or 2023 there was a three bet pot on an ace high monotone board and after the hand two players were talking about the hand and one player said “I’m perfectly balanced here” the other player scoffed because the idea that any player is perfectly balanced in any spot is ridiculous, but especially in an obscure spot like that.
From the outside I think people think top pros know every spot inside and out, but it’s impossible to know every spot inside and out and even if you do know every spot inside and out, you still need to execute under time and financial pressure. If I played a 250bb deep three bet pot LJ vs HJ on J95 rainbow flop check/check turn 5 putting a flush draw on board. I might be able to recall this hand and decide to bet 250% pot, it’s also possible the slight shift in preflop ranges and board textures actually means that a hand like 76 could get away with betting half pot. If I encounter a spot like this in the future the best I can hope for is that I’ll consider b250 as an option and hopefully pick it when it’s appropriate and discard it when it’s not. That doesn’t conjure the cliché image of a studied “wizard” who knows all the answers to all the spots, but is the reality of what’s going on. You learn when about the entire menu of plays available to you in several spots and then you try and choose the best one for the exact spot you encounter.
Media
My episode of the Thinking Poker Podcast drops tomorrow, make sure to listen when it comes out.
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