Rake as the cost of admission
Rake is and always has been the cost of admission. It is the price paid for the dealers, the venue, the organizational and administrative costs. For much of poker’s history, those factors were understood, accepted, and broadly applied with consistency. When I started out nearly twenty years ago, the norms were clear enough. There was 10% charge on live tournaments in the €200 ($238) to €1,000 ($1,189) range. The rake on lower buy-ins sometimes climbed as high as 20% while for higher buy-ins, the % tapered down incrementally. Nobody loved paying it, but nobody was confused by it either. It cost what it said on the tin and the structure made sense.
The structure matters with slower and deeper events costing more to run
Buy-in level is, of course, not the only factor. The structure matters with slower and deeper events costing more to run, justifying a higher rake. Conversely, the % on faster and shallower tournaments should be smaller but that is rarely the case. The quality of the venue matters with fancier locations, especially those booked specifically for the poker event, understandably coming at a higher cost. The perks matter. Does the operator put on a player’s party, give out food or drinks vouchers, have a loyalty scheme or run extra promotions? If it does, then charging a bit more is palatable because the players get value back in other ways.
On the latest episode of ‘The Chip Race,’ Dara O’Kearney and I were joined by WPT champion, 888Live Main Event champion and 2-time GUKPT Main Event champion, Jack Hardcastle, to talk about how rake levels have been trending upwards and the practice of ‘hidden rake’ in the industry. The conversation reflected our broader concerns about the poker ecology. Greed and a lack of transparency might be in an operator’s short term interest but it is actually terrible for business. Poker ecosystems don’t collapse overnight. They degrade slowly, as small inconsistencies are normalized and then forgotten. When cost and value drift apart, players don’t immediately revolt. Rather, they become disloyal and quietly disengage.
Rising costs and the limits of justification
It would be dishonest to discuss increased rake without acknowledging the real pressures operators face. On the podcast, we were keen to underline that point. In Ireland, for example, tournaments are almost exclusively run in hotel ballrooms rather than casinos, and the cost of renting those spaces has risen sharply since COVID. Wages are higher here than in much of Europe, and staffing costs have followed suit.
As Dara explained in the episode, even very large and apparently successful tours often “barely cover costs.” Add VAT taken directly from registration fees, along with increasingly complex regulation, and the margin for error becomes slim. “Other jurisdictions can run tournaments more cheaply, which is why so many tours gravitate toward places like Bratislava,” explained Dara.
greed by some operators who feel like they can get away with gouging their customers
These are not imaginary problems. However, acknowledging legitimate cost increases does not mean giving carte blanche to every rake hike. Alongside genuine pressures, there are also examples of greed by some operators who feel like they can get away with gouging their customers. The metaphor I used on the show was players like the proverbial frogs in boiling water. Incremental increases are tolerated precisely because they are incremental.
How rake became hidden
Arguably, the more corrosive issue is not that rake has gone up, but that it has become harder to see. On The Chip Race, we traced this shift back to what once seemed benign: the dealer add-on. A 2% deduction from the prize pool to cover dealer costs felt reasonable and transparent, particularly as it formalised tipping practices that already existed. Players understood what it was and why it was there.
Over time, though, that number crept up. Two percent became three, then four, and in some cases five percent. More troubling than the increase itself was how it was presented, or rather, how it wasn’t. These deductions were increasingly buried in small print, removed from the headline buy-in, and only discoverable by those inclined to audit prize pool totals after the fact.
Turning the financial terms into another hidden variable does not enhance the game
This creates a clear imbalance of information. Recreational players are less likely to be reading terms and conditions or cross-referencing Hendon Mob data. They see a buy-in, assume it reflects reality, and play. By the time they realise how much has been removed from the prize pool, it is no longer actionable. Poker already involves uncertainty. Turning the financial terms into another hidden variable does not enhance the game; it undermines trust in it.
Hardcastle takes aim at GUKPT
Jack Hardcastle’s appearance on the show brought the issue into sharp focus. A long-time supporter of the Grosvenor tour, he outlined how restructuring had led to significant increases in effective rake. On the £300 ($411) tour, he calculated, rake was now 21%, a figure that should make anyone pause. His framing was important. He described the system as “a regressive tax on the lowest stakes players,” and that description is hard to dispute.
Leaderboard deductions are overwhelmingly funded by recreational players, while the benefits accrue to a relatively small group of high-volume regulars. Those paying the most proportionally have the least chance of seeing a return. I put forward the example of the GUKPT Luton in which a tournament advertised as £1,100 ($1,507) plus £150 ($206) became, once prize-pool deductions were applied, something closer to £1,045 ($1,432) plus £205 ($281). On top of that, a further half-percent was removed to fund a leaderboard that only a handful of regulars could realistically win.
what gave Hardcastle’s criticism real weight was his honesty
In my opinion, what gave Hardcastle’s criticism real weight was his honesty. His objection wasn’t personal. He acknowledged that he had benefited from the system himself, winning packages and playoff prizes. Nonetheless, he is willing to highlight the structural problem, namely that it is a tax on the local players at each stop who won’t travel to other stops on the tour. Take note when the beneficiaries of a model start to question it. Give credit to those who put their heads above the parapet and risk biting the hand that feeds them for a greater good.
The price on the tin
Poker ecosystems rarely implode. They thin out. As Hardcastle warned, high effective rake “is going to make all the Main Event fields shrink,” and we are already seeing signs of that. Low-stakes players lose too quickly, mid-stakes players opt out on value grounds and high-stakes players wonder why they should subsidize inefficiency. Dara suggested that this process has already begun in the UK, driven in part by a lack of genuine competition. A core group of regulars can sustain a tour for a time by recycling money through rakeback and leaderboard returns, but that’s not growth – it’s inertia – and eventually, the math catches up.
There are, however, reasons for cautious optimism. PokerStars listened to the players in 2021 and reduced excessive rake on short-clock tournaments, cutting the effective fees on EPT hypers from 13% to 8%. That made those tournaments genuinely beatable. In 2025, the PartyPoker Live tour removed ‘hidden rake,’ presenting clearer fee structures, without doubt another step in the right direction.
I ended the episode by saying that when it comes to hidden rake, “this practice needs to stop.” Transparency will not fix every problem poker faces, but without doubt, a ‘put-the-price-back-on-the-tin’ approach will be a big step towards restoring trust. The players, professional and recreational alike, deserve to know all the costs upfront.
