Card Player Data Shows Live Tournament Rake Climbing Fastest at Lower Buy-ins
Live tournament rake has crept higher over the last ten years, but the pain is not spread evenly. Card Player compared rake percentages from 2015 and 2019 against 2025-26 fields across a dozen tournaments and found the biggest jumps concentrated in the smallest buy-in levels.
The WSOP $500 Colossus went from 11.50% rake in 2015 to 16.50% in 2019 and now sits at 17.00%, a 5.5-point increase over the decade. The Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood multi-flight event, roughly a $400 buy-in, climbed from 14.29% in 2015 to 18.00% today. The WSOP $1,000 event rose from 11.70% to 12%, and PokerStars’ $1,100 tournament ticked up from 11.81% to 12.73%.
Higher buy-in events told a different story. The WPT 5 Diamond/World Championship $10,400 Main Event actually dropped its rake from 6.73% in 2015 to 5.77% today, a 0.96-point decrease. The WPT $3,700/$3,800 event fell from 8.62% to 7.89%. The EPT Prague €5,300 Main Event held flat at 8.49% across all three years measured. The WSOP $10,000 Main Event, by contrast, rose from 5.99% in 2015 to 7% now, and the L.A. Poker Classic $10,000 Main Event jumped from 4% to 7% over the same span.
Impact on ROI at Different Buy-in Levels
Card Player notes that elite players are largely insulated. The outlet points to Jeremy Ausmus, who has reported a career return on investment north of 40% in live no-limit hold’em tournaments, as an example of a player unlikely to notice a couple of percentage points of added rake.
Players closer to breakeven face a tougher squeeze. A player running a 10% ROI loses a meaningful chunk of profit when rake climbs by two or three points, and Card Player argues that combined with reentry-heavy, late-registration formats, rising rake is draining bankrolls faster than in past years. The WSOP Main Event has lost entries year-over-year in each of the last two years, according to the outlet.
Card Player also flags a counterintuitive wrinkle: because rake eats a smaller percentage of bigger buy-ins while player pools at higher stakes are not proportionally tougher, some players could theoretically post a higher ROI moving up from a $500 event to a $1,000 event rather than continuing to grind at the lower level, where both the rake bite and the relative field strength work against them.
The full data set, spanning three tournaments each at the $10,000, $3,000-to-$5,000, $1,000, and $500 levels, shows the WSOPC $1,700 Main Event holding near 10.88% since 2019 and the WSOPC $400 multi-flight easing slightly from 18.08% in 2015 to 17.50% today, one of the few small-stakes events where rake has not increased over the decade.