Poker Tournament Prize Pool Calculator
Enter your tournament's entries, buy-in, and any rebuys / add-ons / bounties. The calculator computes total collected, the prize pool after rake, whether you've met a guarantee, and a payout breakdown per finishing position. Everything updates live as you type.
Tournament inputs
Results
| Position | % | Payout |
|---|
How the prize pool is calculated
The prize pool is what's left of the total money collected after the house keeps its rake and any bounties are deducted (bounties go directly to the player who eliminates another, not into the prize pool).
Total collected = (Entries × Buy-in) + (Rebuys × Rebuy cost) + (Add-ons × Add-on cost)
Rake total = (Entries + Rebuys + Add-ons) × Rake per entry
Prize pool = Total collected − Rake total − (Entries × Bounty)
If a guarantee is set and the calculated prize pool falls short, the house typically covers the shortfall (called the "overlay") — the prize pool gets bumped up to the guaranteed amount.
Choosing a payout structure
Common rules of thumb for how many players to pay:
- Top 10% paid — the most common structure for small-to-mid tournaments. Concentrates more money at the top, gives the bubble real meaning.
- Top 15% — used in deepstack and weekend events where players sit longer and expect a wider min-cash range.
- Final table only (top 9) — clean for small fields under 50. Pays the visible "final table" only.
- Winner take all — heads-up events, qualifiers, satellites.
Payout curve
This calculator distributes the prize pool using a power-law curve (each finishing position gets roughly 60% of the previous one's share), then rounds to whole dollars and normalizes so the totals match the prize pool exactly. Most tournament software uses something similar; some operators prefer flatter or steeper curves — adjust by hand once you've copied the numbers out.
When to use this calculator
- Planning a home game. Quick way to check what the prize pool will look like at different attendance levels.
- Pre-event check. Confirm your numbers match what the tournament director will display before doors open.
- Live operator math. If you're running a re-entry or rebuy tournament, plug in the running totals to see the updated prize pool at any point.
- Guarantee planning. Set a guarantee and see at what entry count you'd hit it without overlay.
Related tools
Need to design the blind structure too? Use the blind structure generator. Setting up a new tournament and need to know how many chips of each color to put in each starting stack? See the chip allocation calculator.
Running this every week?
This calculator covers the prize-pool math — but a live tournament has 20 other moving parts (clock, blind progression, player roster, eliminations, table balancing, displays). Marquee Poker handles all of it: phone-to-TV control, multi-table support, league + season tracking. Free tier covers single-tournament use.
See Marquee Poker