Poker is a business. In Alberta, where I live, legal poker is played in card rooms attached to casinos which operate under the watchful eye of the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission. I don't know the percentages, but my understanding is that a certain percentage goes to charities - so don't imagine that these places are making the same profits that the places in Vegas make. Poker, unlike slot machines, requires a fairly high level of staffing. Dealers, floor managers, cashiers, waitresses, and cleaning staff all have to be paid. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to try to schedule staff for a poker room. I have walked into a card room at 10:00 am and found two full tables playing with two or three other guys waiting to get in the game. I have walked into this same room at the same time one week later and found nobody at all. How can you schedule staff for a business like this?
Dealing poker must be a very tough way to make a living. You would have to work weird hours as most rooms are (I am guessing) busiest between 8:00 pm and midnight. You would have to have an absolutely amazing short term memory and math skills. The rake is calculated based on the size of the pot so dealers must have a piece of their brain constantly adding up individual bets to know the pot size. Another part of their brain has to remember which players need to have change returned to them. For example in $1/$2 NLHE, the most common game in my part of the world, players are issued stacks of red $5 chips but bets can be any size, so several players can call a $12 bet with three red chips and the dealer has to constantly be making change - in this case giving back three white $1 chips. The dealer also has to keep track of the button - not as easy as it sounds when lots of players "help" the dealer by moving the button themselves.
Most difficult of all, I think, is when a player losses all his chips and rebuys at the table. When this happens a runner comes over to the table and collects money from the player, tells the dealer the amount, and goes to fetch the chips. Even though the player doesn't have chips yet, he or she is still able to play in the next hand. It sometimes can take a minute or two for the chip to arrive and until they do the dealer has to remember the all the bets the player has made and take the total into the pot when his chips come.
They have to deal with multi-way pots - keeping everything straight when there are side pots on top of the main pot.
A dealer has to do all of these things at top speed - the poker room makes its living on the rake, so they want as many hands as possible to be dealt.
On top of everything else a dealer has to be polite to the customers, even though quite a few are just plain assholes, border-line racists and sexist pigs. Fun!
I have no idea how tough their job is. I have only listed a few of the things that I have observed, but I imagine that they are are under a whole lot of other stresses I don't know about. Working in a high stress environment, being surrounded by gambling and booze must tempt quite a few of them to enter into a very destructive lifestyle. A year or so back a dealer at my favourite casino died of a drug overdose.
Be kind to your dealer.
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