Tip your Blackjack Dealer

Dear Mark, You advocate in your column tipping the dealer. I¹ve only been playing blackjack a short time but never realized dealers also merited tips. How customary is this procedure? Joseph P.
If casino owners could finagle it, monkeys would be dealing blackjack. All dealers at one time or another have heard management tell us to "shut up and shuffle. I could get a monkey to do this job." To date, no casino has successfully trained a chimp to replace a dealer. The chimpanzees don¹t quite have the splitting rules down yet, can only make even money payoffs, plus they tend not to wait for their break to use the bathroom. Since casinos do tacky well, they don't want their gaudy carpets dirty; therefore, a near anthropological equivalent humans.
Kidding aside, it's simple economics. Being in gaming for over twenty years now, I¹ve yet to meet a dealer who will work for minimum wage. Tipping a dealer is the cost of enjoying a particular service, very similar to tipping a coffeeshop or cocktail waitress. Dealers need those gestures of gratuity to make a decent wage. If the casinos had to pay a true living wage to dealers instead of dealers accepting tips, casinos would have to figure a way of making up for lost revenue. For starters, they would change the rules of the game, increase table minimums, and even alter paybacks, like paying even money on a blackjack; that Bonzo can do. It¹s either or, Joseph. You can't have both.
I¹ve always considered tipping, whether I was dealer for hire or in casino management, a contribution to the Dame of Fortune, Lady Luck. You should too.