Your income in this job is not one thing. It is three streams with different rules, arriving at different times, and one of them gets taken back out before you see it. Almost every confusion about bartender pay comes from treating it as a single number.
The three streams
The hourly wage. Paid by the employer for hours worked, whether or not a single guest walks in. It covers your prep, your side work and your close as well as your service time. In some states this is the full state minimum wage before any tips; in others the employer may pay a lower cash wage and count part of your tips toward the minimum. That difference is large and it is set by law where you work, which is why it gets its own lesson later in this module.
Tips. Left by guests, on cards or in cash, according to a norm rather than a rate. The norm varies by segment and by region and it is not something you set. This is usually the largest stream and always the most variable.