I think of this as a mental question. If it isn't feel free to move this topic where it needs to be.

As a second job I deal for a casino party company (mostly craps but also poker). It means when I play in home games everyone wants me to deal because it's stupid for people at an oblong table to deal from either end, and they like my “professionalism,” a term I like to use loosely 🙂

I like to deal also, because I don't like the way nondealers deal, exposing cards, rolling the deck, dealing the flop one card at a time, etc. When my money is at risk, I want to replicate an actual game.

But here's the thing. If we don't have another dealer, I have to focus on dealing, each and every hand. After a couple hours of this, it's really hard to focus on playing well.

I don't want to take a 5-minute break every now and then because it's disruptive to the bad players. What I mean by that is someone invariably runs well and then plays so LAGgy that the money is ripe for the picking. I don't want to give them a chance to re-center themselves. Also, now that we're all in our 30s (lol) any break in the action means texting wives, finding excuses to leave, etc. A recent Thinking Poker podcast talked about how bad players sometimes will double up and then leave right away. That's what I'm trying to avoid.

So there are a lot of variables here:

1) my awareness/alertness

2) keeping other players going

3) dealer quality

Where can I find the mental equivalent of poker stove to figure out which of these has the highest EV? 🙂