Setting a payout to total 90%

[ECat]

Apologies for the newbie question, but I'm looking to distribute NLH tournament winnings and hold back 10% of the pot. It appears I can set that fine in the Admin, but when I actually run the tournament, where will the 10% go? Presumably, it will show in the Total House balance, but wanted to be sure this will behave as I expect before firing it up. Thanks.

[Kent Briggs]

Only ring games rake the pot. Tournament chips have no value. Instead, the House can collect an Entry Fee that is added to the Buy-In. The buy-ins go to the prizepool and entry fees go into the House Entry Fee account, which you can see when you click the House button on the Accounts tab. And every entry fee credit (like all chip transactions) is recorded in the daily Event Log.

[ECat]

Thanks for the quick reply. I understand the Entry Fee approach. Just trying to see if avoid the front-end fee and take it out on the back-end of the pot. I get that this isn't a proper "rake," but just curious if it works (in a weird way) to set payout to 90%. Since it wouldn't be a rake, the chips credited back to player accounts for winning payout would, effectively, be reduced by 10%, and they'd disappear into thin air (I guess?) since they wouldn't show up in the House account?

[Kent Briggs]

Thanks for the quick reply. I understand the Entry Fee approach. Just trying to see if avoid the front-end fee and take it out on the back-end of the pot. I get that this isn't a proper "rake," but just curious if it works (in a weird way) to set payout to 90%. Since it wouldn't be a rake, the chips credited back to player accounts for winning payout would, effectively, be reduced by 10%, and they'd disappear into thin air (I guess?) since they wouldn't show up in the House account?

You keep using the term pot when the pot is the pile of tournament chips on the table for each hand. Tournament chips are temporary, they have no value, they have no relationship to player account balances. They all end up in front of the winner at the end then they disappear. What gets credited back to the winning players are a percentage of the buy-in. Buy-in and entry fee chips are real, they come from the player account balances, but have no relation to the starting chips given to each player inside the tournament. Setting the entry fee from 5% to 10% of the buy-in is the normal way tournaments are operated.

[ECat]

Got it, entry fee will be the mechanism. I'm an amateur at cards, but volunteered to help run the neighborhood game b/c I could muster an aged Windows Vista laptop to be a dedicated server and understood the concept of port forwarding. As I try to translate how that game was run into the software, I'm having to learn the details and lingo better. Sorry for the trouble, but really appreciate your responsiveness. The software is a hit, and we've had a couple of Friday night games already that just need to be tuned up a bit.