Live Tournament Rake Is Squeezing Smaller-Stakes Players Most, Card Player Finds
A comparison of events across four buy-in bands found thinner low-stakes edges, while higher buy-ins can offer better ROI when player pools are comparable.
Live tournament rake has risen most noticeably at smaller buy-ins, tightening margins at the lower end, according to a Card Player comparison of events from 2025-26 with comparable tournaments in 2015 and 2019.
The review covered three tournaments at each of four price points: $10,000, $3,000-$5,000, $1,000 and $500. Its central conclusion was not that live tournament rake is climbing at an alarming rate across the board. Rather, small-stakes players are bearing the largest squeeze, while costs at higher buy-ins have remained roughly steady.
That distinction matters for return on investment. The analysis found that higher rake made only a small difference to the bottom lines of top players at their respective stakes, but said a player operating at 10% ROI is significantly affected by an increase of a couple of percentage points. More reentries and later registration have added to the pressure by draining bankrolls faster, it said.
Card Player argued that the gap in rake between a $500 and a $1,000 event can outweigh the relative difference in the strength of their player pools. If the fields are broadly similar, a winning player can post a better ROI in the larger buy-in because the fee is a smaller share of the entry and the player is competing for larger dollar amounts. More of each buy-in also reaches the prize pool.
For bankroll-constrained players, the article suggested selling more action to enter bigger events could be preferable to repeatedly playing high-rake lower-stakes tournaments. It also said players can pressure operators by avoiding events with higher fees, encouraging schedules with lower rake.
The concern around low buy-ins is not new. Red Chip Poker previously argued that many tournaments below roughly $150 have fees high enough to make a positive ROI doubtful even for a strong tournament player. Its example of an approximately $80 daily tournament in smaller Las Vegas rooms put total juice at about $25.
At the highest-profile U.S. series, the picture is more mixed. The WSOP collected about $47.3 million in tournament fees in 2026, almost unchanged from 2025 despite a slight increase in rake across the schedule. Its $10,000 no-limit hold’em world championship drew 9,208 entries. The main event lost entries year-over-year for a second consecutive year even as the full WSOP set a record with about 251,900 entries.
The broader point of the comparison is that the buy-in threshold for a theoretically beatable live tournament is moving upward as operators’ costs rise, putting the greatest strain on players near the bottom of the live tournament ecosystem.
