"Buy-ins need to go up." That sounds like something a rich poker pro would say, right?
Context that changes everything about that sentence: it was said by Joe McKeehen, the 2015 WSOP Main Event champion, and he was not talking about high rollers. He was talking about the $300, $400, and $500 tournaments that recreational and semi-professional players grind every week — the backbone of the live tournament ecosystem. And his argument is not that these players should pay more to play. His argument is that they are already paying more than they realize, and the money is not going where they think it is.
In a recent interview with PokerOrg, McKeehen laid out a case that most players feel intuitively but have never seen articulated with numbers: rising rake is quietly destroying the economics of small buy-in tournaments, turning them into long-term losing propositions for everyone at the table — recreational and professional alike.
The Math Problem
When you enter a poker tournament, your buy-in is split into two parts: the portion that goes into the prize pool, and the portion that goes to the house. The house's cut — the rake, or tournament fee — is how the operator makes money on the event.
Tournament pricing uses a "buy-in + fee" notation. A tournament listed as "$1,000 + $100" costs you $1,100 to enter: the $1,000 goes into the prize pool, and the $100 goes to the house. That $100 fee represents about 9% of your total outlay. In a "$10,000 + $600" tournament — $10,600 out of your pocket — the house takes under 6%. The higher the buy-in, the lower the rake percentage tends to be, not because operators are being generous to wealthy players, but because the fixed costs of running a tournament (dealers, floor staff, table time, cage operations) do not scale linearly with buy-in size.
Now look at what happens at the low end. A "$400 + $60" tournament costs you $460 — and 13% of that total goes to the house. A "$300 + $50" event costs $350, with the rake above 14%. These are not unusual numbers. In many regional card rooms, small buy-in tournaments routinely carry effective rakes north of 13%, and some push past 20%.
The pattern is consistent: the lowest buy-in events carry the highest percentage fees, even though these are the price points least able to absorb the drag. Tournament rake comes directly off the top, before a single card is dealt. In a "$400 + $60" tournament with 200 entries, players collectively put up $92,000. Only $80,000 makes it into the prize pool. The other $12,000 goes straight to the house. Every player at that table is competing for a pool that is already 13% smaller than the sum of what they collectively paid.
This isn't a problem that needs time to show up. A skilled player still needs a real edge over the field to post long-term profits in any tournament. At the low end of the buy-in ladder, rake above 13% can eat more than that edge is worth from the first entry — not because the player isn't good, but because the pricing leaves no room for skill to assert itself. The mismatch between price and value is there on day one. Grinding fifty or a hundred of these events a year doesn't create the problem; it just turns a bad starting deal into a steady bleed.
The Fix Is Simpler Than It Sounds
McKeehen's proposed solution is elegantly straightforward: raise the buy-in, keep the rake dollar amount the same.
Take that "$400 + $60" tournament. If the operator raises it to "$800 + $60" — an $860 event — the effective rake drops from 13% to 7%. With 200 entries, the prize pool jumps from $80,000 to $160,000. The house still makes its $12,000. The players get twice as much money in the pool.
The obvious objection is that not everyone can afford $800, and that concern is worth taking seriously. Greg Himmelbrand, a fellow grinder who pushed back on McKeehen publicly, argues there is a real ceiling between $600 and $800 where a meaningful number of players stop showing up. McKeehen's counter is a math one: the $800 version would need the field to shrink by about 25% — from 2,000 entries down to 1,500 — before its prize pool fell below what the $600 version produced. He estimates real-world attrition at closer to 5–10%, which still leaves the pool significantly larger.
A $400 tournament is more accessible at the cage than an $800 tournament. That is a real distributional wrinkle in McKeehen's fix: it favors the working grinder with the bankroll to absorb the higher buy-in over the casual player for whom $400 was already the ceiling. But accessibility to value is a different measurement than accessibility to the cage. A higher buy-in paired with a lower rake percentage puts more of the player's money back into the prize pool — which is where value lives for the people actually playing. That's a pricing structure that favors competitors, even if it creates legitimate concerns for operators about filling the room.
The Operator's Perspective
Low buy-ins fill seats, and seat count is the metric that drives tournament scheduling decisions at most card rooms. A $400 tournament that draws 200 entries looks better on a spreadsheet than an $800 tournament that draws 120 — even if the $800 event generates comparable total rake and delivers a better player experience. The short-term logic favors the low buy-in every time; the long-term problem is that players grinding those events eventually notice they cannot get ahead, not because their poker is bad but because the economics are stacked against them.
This is not purely theoretical. Borgata tried raising its opener to $800 at one point, then reverted to $600 when attendance dipped. McKeehen's read: the attendance drop was not about the buy-in alone. It was about the overall player experience — scheduling problems, structure quality, late registration policies — driving players away regardless of the price point. The buy-in change may have taken the blame for other problems the operator had not addressed. And when MGM National Harbor ran $500 buy-in events with a $100-plus rake, the backlash was immediate and the turnout was dismal — the market does respond to bad pricing.
Justin Hammer, a working tournament director and Live Events Director for PokerAtlas, offered the operator counter in a response to McKeehen's interview in PokerOrg. It is worth engaging with, because it reflects the pressures any real reform will have to navigate.
Hammer's first point is that inflation cuts both ways. Players are absorbing the higher rake on their end, but operators are absorbing the same macro pressures on theirs — labor, floor time, overhead — and those costs have to come from somewhere. On top of that, tournaments themselves have gotten more expensive to run. Eight years ago, a typical tournament used 5,000 starting chips and 20-minute levels and wrapped in six hours. Today's events run deeper stacks and longer levels across multiple days, and part of the rake increase is funding that. Some of the creep McKeehen describes is the cost of a more polished tournament, not pure extraction.
Hammer also pushes back on the framing players often use when making this argument. The pitch "this tournament isn't beatable" lands badly with operators, he points out, because unbeatable games are literally what casinos sell. Telling a floor manager their product isn't beatable for skilled players isn't going to move them to cut their own revenue. The argument that actually works, Hammer suggests, is one that treats rake reform as mutually beneficial — lower rake, more retention, more sustained revenue for operators over time.
That framing is worth pushing back on. Poker is not a house-banked game. When a player loses at blackjack or a slot machine, the casino wins the money directly. When a player busts out of a poker tournament, the house doesn't win anything — another player does. Operators in this context are service providers facilitating competition between customers, more analogous to a horse-racing track running pari-mutuel betting than a casino running its own blackjack table. The track takes a cut regardless of which horse wins, but it has no stake in the outcome. That distinction matters because it reframes what the rake actually is: not a house edge, but a service fee. And service fees, like any other price, have to be calibrated against what the customer is getting in return.
Hammer's prescription for players is to vote with their wallets — if a tournament's rake is too high, skip the event — and he points to experiments like PokerAtlas's VALUETOWN series, which is running lower-rake events specifically to test whether leaner pricing brings in enough volume to justify the change.
That prescription puts more of the burden on players than the economics justify. Players who want to compete will play what is scheduled — that is how demand works when the supply is limited to what operators choose to offer. Expecting grinders to organize a coordinated boycott against the only events running in their market treats industry agency as a player problem. Operators know what they charge. They see the rake percentages at every level of their schedule. They have the pricing power and the infrastructure. Leadership on rake structure has to come from the operators who are doing the structuring, not from the customers paying to play inside it.
McKeehen's critique and Hammer's response are both pointing at real things. McKeehen is saying the product is broken at the low end. Hammer is saying any fix has to make business sense to the people running the room. Both are right. But the responsibility for the fix cannot sit with one player making a case in an interview. If the path forward is one where a leaner rake structure generates healthier long-term economics for players and operators alike, it is on operators to lead the experiments that prove it.
To be clear: this is not an argument for no rake — it is an argument for calibrating rake in a way that aligns interests.
The Rake Creep Nobody Noticed
There is a darker thread in McKeehen's argument that deserves its own attention: rake has been increasing while buy-ins have stayed flat, and most players have not noticed.
Ten years ago, a $400 tournament at a regional card room might have been structured as "$400 + $40" — about 9% going to the house. Today, that same tournament at the same room might be "$400 + $60" or "$400 + $65" — 13% to 14% rake. The buy-in portion hasn't moved, but the effective rake has climbed nearly 50%. Plenty of players notice the fees have risen. What they usually lack is the context to put it in perspective — to know what a sustainable rake percentage actually looks like, and to recognize that their expected value is being eroded by a structural change they never got to weigh in on.
McKeehen's observation that "people in the smaller buy-ins don't realize that the rake has gone up and the buy-in has stayed the same" is not condescension. It is a description of an information asymmetry that the industry has no incentive to correct. The poker itself may have actually improved over the last decade — deeper stacks, longer levels, better structures on paper. The economics for many lower buy-in events have gone the other way. Admitting that would mean admitting that a bigger share of every buy-in is being taken before players ever compete for it.
Who This Argument Is Really For
One scope note before anything else: the "buy-ins should go up" argument applies unevenly across the tournament landscape. At the WSOP, pricing already delivers reasonable value relative to rake. McKeehen's critique is concentrated in the regional and circuit-level events where working players spend most of their time and money — a grinder who plays one WSOP event a year and fifty regionals feels the rake structure of those fifty events far more than the one.
The instinctive reaction to "buy-ins should go up" is still that it is a pro talking in pro interests — someone wealthy enough to play any tournament telling average players to spend more. PokerOrg's headline framing did not help. Neither does the broader context of poker discourse, where buy-in debates are usually proxy wars between high-roller regulars and everyone else.
But McKeehen's argument lands differently when you follow it to its conclusion. He is not saying "make tournaments more expensive so I can play against smaller fields." He is saying "the current pricing structure is a bad deal for the exact players it claims to serve, and fixing it would put more money in their pockets, not less."
A recreational player who enters a "$400 + $60" tournament most weekends — about fifty events a year — is paying $23,000 in total buy-ins. Of that, $3,000 goes to the house and never reaches a prize pool. Now imagine the same player enters twenty-five "$800 + $60" events instead: total cost drops to $21,500, and only $1,500 goes to the house. The prize pool contribution is identical — $20,000 either way — but the player saves $1,500 in fees and spends $1,500 less overall.
What Better Looks Like
Healthier means buy-ins set where rake percentages are sustainable for the player base — under 10%, ideally closer to 7–8% — and a pricing structure that treats player time and money as finite rather than renewable. None of that requires radical change. It requires operators to address what they have the data and authority to address, and it requires players to pay attention to what they are actually buying.
Honest engagement between the two is a good start.