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Tournament Payout Calculator

Nothing derails a final table like arguing about the money. Enter your field and buy-in; get a standard curve — clean numbers, no leftover dollars, no debate.

Prize pool $1,080 · paying 3 of 18:

1st$62557.9%
2nd$28025.9%
3rd$17516.2%

Rounded to clean numbers; the remainder rides with first place. Adjust places paid to taste — 15% of the field is the live-poker norm.

How the curve is built

Payouts follow a power curve: each place earns meaningfully less than the one above, steep at the top and gentle at the bottom — the same shape casinos and card rooms use. The calculator normalizes that curve across your chosen places, rounds everything to clean numbers, and pushes the rounding remainder into first place, so the table total always equals the pool to the dollar.

How many places should a poker tournament pay?

The live-poker norm is roughly 15% of the field: a 10-player game pays 2, an 18-player game pays 3, a 30-player game pays 4–5. Home games sometimes pay flatter to keep more people happy.

What is a standard poker payout structure?

Top-heavy but not brutal: first place usually earns 40–50% of the pool in small fields, with each place after receiving noticeably less. For a 3-place table, 50/30/20 is the classic split.

Should first place get half the prize pool?

In fields under 20 players, close to half is standard and rewards the win. Larger fields flatten the top: with 5+ places paid, first typically takes 30–38%.

Payouts, tracked automatically.

RebuyLabs computes the pool live from buy-ins and rebuys, and records who won what — every event, every season.

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