In theory, this means you will have to play a decent sample of these home games and change the situation each time so others are dealing and take note of errors (dealer quality) and your awareness/alertness then deal for a few yourself and see how this has changed. Keep notes or a journal.

Whilst in theory it can be done, in practice it may seem inefficient. To find a good balance perhaps you should deal for the first hour or two and then change to having everyone deal. There are many ways you could approach the game for balance.

The biggest issue I see is whilst you are hindering yourself by having to focus on dealing you are actually giving the others an edge by them not having to do so, which may or may not change their play.

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? 🙂