How much does it cost to run a ClubGG club

Originally published on easyrake.app.

You can open a club on ClubGG in a couple of minutes. Working out how much it actually makes is another story. You see the week's rake right away, and the number usually looks good. Then the owner checks the wallet, and somehow there is less money in it.

Let's see where it goes.

Where the club's money comes from

A club makes money on rake: a small percentage taken from every pot at the table. The owner decides how much to take and what cap to set when setting up a table. More tables running for longer means more rake.

But rake is not your profit yet. It is everything that went through the tables, and money starts leaving that pile right away.

Where the rake goes

Rakeback comes first. Players expect to get part of the rake back, and if your club gives back less than others, they will simply move to another one. Every player has their own rate, and together it adds up to a big chunk of the rake.

Then there are agents. If agents bring players to your club, each one gets a percentage of their players' action. In clubs with a large agent network, this can be the biggest cost after rakeback.

Next come promotions: guaranteed freerolls, deposit bonuses, giveaways. A club does not grow without them, but you are the one paying for them.

If your club has a Bad Beat jackpot, part of every pot goes into the fund. That money belongs to the players, and you can't count it as club income.

There are also small things that add up over a month. ClubGG charges diamonds, its in-app currency, for paid features such as the club report export. Exchanges and wallets take a fee on every deposit and withdrawal. And the managers who hand out chips and take payments need to be paid too.

And the last one, the one people think about least: debts that never get repaid. If you give chips on credit, some of that money will be lost sooner or later. As much as you'd like it to be otherwise, it is a cost too, and you have to plan for that risk up front. It is one of the main reasons clubs shut down. That is why it matters so much to keep limits on credit and be ready to cover that money out of your own pocket or out of profit.

What it looks like in numbers

Let's take a made-up week. The numbers are just an example, yours will be different.

Out of ten thousand in rake, roughly a third stays with the club. And that is if everything is counted correctly. Pay out rakeback twice once, or forget about someone's debt, and profit starts leaking away without you even noticing.

Why owners often don't know what they made

A club's money is rarely in one place. Some is in crypto, often across several wallets, some is cash with a manager, some is on a card. To know how much you really have, you need to put it all together.

Chips in players' hands are misleading too. If players hold twenty thousand in chips, that is money you owe them, and the cash box only looks richer than it is.

Debts work the other way. Until a player pays, the debt exists only on paper, there is no money behind it.

And rakeback and agent payouts are easy to get wrong. Players have different rates, those rates can differ by game, people move from one agent to another. One broken formula in a spreadsheet, and a month later nobody remembers where the mistake is.

How to tell your numbers don't add up

If any of this sounds familiar, it is worth stopping and recounting:

• there is less money in the wallets than your calculations say;
• a player is sure he owes nothing, but you have a debt on record;
• the week's rakeback came out higher than you expected for that rake;
• an agent disputes the amount, and you have nothing to back up your number.

How EasyRake helps

EasyRake takes the ClubGG report and works out the rake, each player's rakeback, what agents are owed, who owes what and how many chips are in players' hands. Then it checks all of that against the club's money. After every game day you see what the club actually made, not just what went through the tables.

You can set a credit limit for each player. The manager sees how much room is left on the limit, and if the next chip payout would go over it, the app warns right away.

It all runs in Telegram, no spreadsheets. It already runs in live clubs.