Every losing player blames the rake. Most of the time they are wrong — the real reason poker got harder is that everyone got better. But a new decade-spanning analysis of live tournament rake published by Card Player suggests the complaint has a real basis, just not where most people assume. The squeeze is not at the top. It is at the bottom.
The study compared rake percentages in comparable live tournaments across 2015, 2019 and 2025-26, sampling three events each at the $10,000, $3,000-$5,000, $1,000 and $500 buy-in levels. The conclusions are uncomfortable for anyone grinding the cheap end of the live circuit.
The headline findings
Three trends emerged from the data:
- Rake has mostly gone up, with the World Poker Tour a notable exception
- Most increases are small — generally around one percentage point or less
- The greatest impact has landed at the $500 level
That third point is where the story lives. At the top of the market, rake has barely moved in a decade. At the bottom, it has moved by amounts that materially change whether a tournament is beatable.
The numbers, level by level
At $10,000:
| Tournament | 2015 | 2019 | 2025-26 | Change from 2015 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WSOP Main Event | 5.99% | 6% | 7% | +1.01% |
| WPT World Championship $10,400 | 6.73% | 6.73% | 5.77% | −0.96% |
| L.A. Poker Classic $10,000 | 4% | 5.32% | 7% | +3% |
The WPT actually cut its rake on the flagship $10,400 event over the period — a rare case of an operator moving in the player's favour. The L.A. Poker Classic went the other way, climbing three points from an unusually low 4% base.
At $3,000-$5,000:
EPT Prague's €5,300 Main Event has held at 8.49% for the entire decade — unchanged in 2015, 2019 and today. The WPT's $3,700-$3,800 events came down slightly. The WSOP's $5,000 events rose from 6% to 8%.
At $1,000:
PokerStars' $1,100 live events went from 11.81% to 12.73%. The WSOP $1,000 sits at 12%, up from 11.70% in 2015 — though it dipped to 10% in 2019 before climbing back. The WSOP Circuit $1,700 Main Event has been stable at 10.88% since 2019.
At $500 and below:
This is where it gets ugly.
| Tournament | 2015 | 2019 | 2025-26 | Change from 2015 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WSOP $500 Colossus | 11.50% | 16.50% | 17.00% | +5.50% |
| Seminole Hard Rock ~$400 multi-flight | 14.29% | 15% | 18.00% | +3.71% |
| WSOPC $400 multi-flight | 18.08% | 17.50% | 17.50% | −0.58% |
The Colossus has gone from taking 11.5% of your buy-in to taking 17%. The Seminole multi-flight events now take 18 cents of every dollar before a single chip hits the felt. And note the WSOP Circuit $400, which was already at 18.08% in 2015 — the cheap end of live poker has been expensive for a long time. It has simply become more uniformly so.
Why this matters more than one percentage point sounds like
A one-point rake increase sounds trivial. Run it through the ROI maths and it stops sounding trivial.
Jeremy Ausmus has publicly stated a career live no-limit hold'em ROI north of 40%. A player at that level absorbs a percentage point of extra rake and barely registers it — their edge dwarfs the cost.
Now consider a solid but unspectacular local grinder running a 10% ROI. That is a genuinely winning player. If the rake on their regular $500 tournament rises from 11.5% to 17%, they have just lost 5.5 percentage points of gross return. Against a 10% ROI, that is not a haircut — it is most of the profit.
This is the mechanism behind the widening gap between "good player" and "winning player" at small stakes. The skill threshold required to beat a 17-18% rake structure is considerably higher than the threshold required to beat an 11.5% one, and the player pool at $400-$500 has not got 6% weaker to compensate. It has got stronger.
Reentries and late registration compound the problem
Rake is only half the equation. The modern tournament ecosystem also runs on liberal re-entry rules and late registration windows that stretch deep into Day 1.
Each re-entry is another full rake payment. A player firing four bullets into a $500 event at 17% rake has paid $340 in fees on $2,000 of buy-ins — and has done so while entering progressively shorter-stacked into a field where the average stack is growing.
The combined effect is that tournament formats now drain recreational bankrolls faster than they did a decade ago, even when the headline buy-in looks identical. That may be showing up in participation numbers: the WSOP Main Event has lost entries year-over-year twice in a row, a reversal of the growth trend that defined the post-2003 era.
The counterintuitive fix: move up
Here is the part of the analysis that should change how small-stakes players build their schedules.
The rake difference between a $500 event and a $1,000 event is roughly five to six percentage points — 17% versus around 12%. The skill difference between the two player pools is real but modest. Plenty of the same faces play both.
That combination produces a genuinely strange outcome: many players would post a higher ROI in the higher-stakes event, despite tougher opposition, purely because more of their money reaches the prize pool. They are not just playing for bigger dollars — they are keeping a larger share of every dollar they put in.
Yes, some players fire the $500 and never the $1,000. But that group is a smaller portion of the pool than most people assume, and the softest spots in a $1,000 field are frequently soft enough to offset the difference.
For a bankroll-constrained player, the conclusion is not "play beyond your roll." It is that selling action into a bigger, lower-rake event is often mathematically superior to grinding a full schedule of high-rake cheap ones. Our bankroll management guide covers how to structure staking and action sales without exposing yourself to ruin.
Voting with your wallet
There is a collective dimension too. Operators set rake based on what fields tolerate. If players consistently chose the lower-rake option among comparable events, schedules would adjust — not out of generosity, but because the higher-rake tournaments would underperform.
That is a slow lever, and no individual player pulls it alone. But schedule-shopping is free, and the information is public. Before you register for a multi-flight $400, check what the room takes and check what a nearby $600 or $1,100 takes. The gap is frequently larger than the buy-in difference implies.
What this means for players
If you play $400-$500 live tournaments regularly: your edge is thinner than you think, and it has been getting thinner for a decade without you changing anything. Do the arithmetic on your own results with an 17-18% fee assumption rather than the 10-11% you may be mentally carrying from years ago.
If you are choosing between buy-in levels: the higher event may genuinely be the better investment. Compare rake percentages explicitly rather than assuming they scale proportionally with buy-in. They do not — they fall sharply as buy-ins rise.
If you are a cash game player: the same pressures apply differently. Live cash rake is capped per pot rather than charged per entry, which changes the calculus entirely. Our cash games vs tournaments comparison covers how the two cost structures diverge, and the cash games page ranks rooms by table availability.
If you play online instead: the rake picture is different again, and rakeback programmes recover a meaningful portion of what you pay. Start with the rakeback guide and the what is rakeback explainer, then compare the offers at BetOnline and TigerGaming, both of which run structured reward programmes that offset tournament fees.
On improving your edge: if rake is compressing your margin, the only lever entirely within your control is raising your win rate. Our poker strategy hub and the pot odds explainer are the starting points, and the poker odds calculator is useful for auditing the marginal spots where thin edges get won and lost.
The bottom line: live tournament rake is not spiralling out of control across the board. But at the level where most recreational players actually play, it has risen enough over ten years to change the answer to the only question that matters — is this game beatable for me?
Sources: Card Player