When the WSOP announced on May 7 that players would be able to rate dealers through the WSOP Live app this summer — with the highest-rated dealers earning financial bonuses and prime table assignments — the reaction was anything but unanimous.
Bracelet winners like Jeremy Ausmus and Josh Arieh praised the move as long-overdue accountability, while voices like Shaun Deeb called it “annoying” while others deemed it to be cruel.
We figured the smartest thing to do was stop arguing in the group chat and put three of our writers’ views down on the page. What we got back was a clean split: one full endorsement, one cultural pushback, and one corporate-distrust takedown.
Anuj: “If you’re good at your job, ratings shouldn’t be a worry”
Anuj came out swinging in favor of the system, and his argument boils down to one principle: ratings are how the modern world separates competence from coasting, and poker dealing shouldn’t be exempt.
“I rely so much on ratings almost everywhere,” he says. “Google Maps, Uber, restaurant ratings. Back in India, we have a service called Urban Company, where you book a salon visit, a carpenter, an electrician at home — and every professional has a rating. 4.8+ is very reliable, and anything below 4.2 you already know the service isn’t great. It’s not apples to apples, but if you’re very good at your job, you should be rewarded.”
The most common objection — that a single tilted player can torch a dealer’s livelihood over a bad beat — doesn’t move him much. “Over the entire course of the WSOP, those tilted one-star ratings will get buried under hundreds of genuine ones. And it also depends on how WSOP designs the system. Extreme outlier ratings should carry less weight.”
He did concede one practical point: most players won’t bother to rate at all unless prompted. “If you get to rate right after your tournament ends and it pops up for everyone, that’s fair. But if you have to go hunting through the app, only players with a bad experience will rate.”
Sam: “Rating systems shouldn’t be personal”
Sam’s objection isn’t really about whether the system works — it’s about whether it should exist at all when applied to individual workers.
“I don’t like rating systems when they’re personal. For companies, fine. But this opens people up to bullying or abuse, and that must be tough on a person. Dealing is a hard job at the best of times, and then the added pressure of being rated must be awful.”
She points to a darker undertone: the whole setup feels like a corporate dodge. “Pay people well in the first place. Don’t rely on the company reading public reviews to decide whether your employees deserve a bonus. It’s not a fair system. What if you’ve got a horrid table, they rate you unfairly, and you’re penalized for it? It’s way too subjective. It feels cruel.”
And then there’s the Black Mirror of it all. “I watched an episode once where every interaction was rated on a five-star basis and you couldn’t rent a house or get a job if you weren’t ranked highly. It has genuinely stayed with me as a troubling way society could go.”
Ivan: “The end goal is usually to spend less on the people who make things happen”
Ivan agrees with Sam, but his core problem isn’t with rating systems in principle — it’s with trusting a large corporation to implement one in good faith.
“I’ll never trust any big corporation to do something like this and actually achieve something positive. It just gives them more reasons to screw people over. And how do you even rate a dealer when everyone has different preferences? Some players want chatty, some want silent, some want friendly.”
He echoes a point first raised by Jeremy Ausmus in the public debate — that the real fix sits one level up. “If we’re talking competence, why isn’t the largest poker series in the world just hiring all the best dealers out there? You don’t want to pay for it. So instead you give players a facility to express their dissatisfaction. Why is it always the hard-working folk that get shafted?”
His read on the structural incentive is bleak. “If a big corporation does anything, the end goal is usually to spend less on the people who make things happen.”
He also flagged a participation bias the system seems blind to: “It will mostly be used for bad feedback. If your dealer is just doing their job pretty well — nothing extraordinary, just dealing cards, pushing pots — not many people will take the time to rate them. That’s reality. So all the folks who are kind of invisible will look worse than they are.”
His proposed fix is the most concrete of the three: push notifications during tournament breaks asking players to rate the dealers from the last couple of rounds. “That way more people will do it, and the dealers who quietly do their jobs without playing the clown will get the fair rating they deserve.”
He did offer one (mostly) tongue-in-cheek alternative: let players rate other players. “That would be much more fair. And entertaining.”
Where they actually agree (and disagree)
| Position | Anuj | Sam | Ivan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supports the rating system | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Believes pay is the real issue | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Concerned about subjective/unfair ratings | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Worries average dealers will be invisible | ✔️ | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Wants push notifications to boost participation | ✔️ | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Sees it as corporate cost-cutting in disguise | ❌ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Trusts WSOP to implement it fairly | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ |
What’s interesting is that even the two writers who oppose the system land on a near-identical fix: pay dealers properly and hire better in the first place. Sam frames it as a fairness issue; Ivan frames it as a corporate-trust issue. Anuj, by contrast, treats the ratings as a feature of any modern service economy — one the WSOP is overdue in adopting.
The takeaway
The interesting thing is that even Anuj — the one writer who endorses the system outright — agrees with Ivan on one of the most damning practical critiques: that without active prompts, only disgruntled players will bother rating. If that prediction holds when the cards hit the felt on May 26 for the start of the 2026 WSOP, then regardless of who’s right about the principle, the data will be skewed before the first bonus is paid.
That’s probably the real test of the system. Not whether players should be allowed to rate dealers, but whether the people actually doing the rating represent anything close to a fair sample of who sat at the table.
We’ll find out over the next two months.
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Word from the author: this was compiled from a group chat discussion between three of our writers and lightly edited for clarity. The views are theirs, not necessarily the publication’s.
