What a pool night is actually worth to a bar

Bars routinely optimise the smaller of the two numbers, and it costs them the bigger one.

Two numbers

Twenty players, two hours in the building, two drinks each at six dollars.

Drinks: $240.

Twenty players at a five dollar buy-in, with a fifteen per cent house cut.

Cut: $15.

That ratio — sixteen to one — is the whole argument, and it holds at almost every realistic buy-in. The tournament is a promotion that fills a dead night. The pot is the reason people come. It is not the revenue, and treating it as revenue is how a bar ends up protecting fifteen dollars while losing a hundred.

Where the trade actually happens

Nobody consciously decides to trade $240 for $15. It happens in smaller decisions:

Raising the buy-in from $5 to $20, which halves the field.
Taking a thirty per cent cut, which sends the regulars to the bar down the road next month.
Running a bracket because it finishes faster, which empties the room at nine.
Paying one place with twenty-four entrants, so twenty-three people go home with nothing and a third of them do not come back.

Each of those looks locally sensible. All four shrink the number that matters.

The counter-argument, fairly stated

A cut is not always wrong. If the table is coin-operated, twelve racks at a dollar is a genuine cost, and "the cut feeds the table" is a sentence nobody argues with. If somebody is being paid to run the night, that has to come from somewhere.

The rule is not "never take a cut". It is: take a cut for a reason you can say out loud, and say it before anybody pays. The amount is almost never the problem. Being surprised by it always is.

What is worth more than the cut

A bar tab for the winner costs the venue wholesale and is worth retail to the player — and unlike cash, it gets spent in the building.

A trophy that lives behind the bar with the current holder's name on it costs forty dollars once. People defend a trophy in a way they do not defend twelve dollars.

Free entry next week for whoever goes out first is the cheapest retention mechanism in this article, and the one most likely to get somebody back through the door.

The number to actually watch

Not the pot. How many people are still in the room at 9:30.

That is the number the format controls, it is the number the drinks revenue tracks, and it is the only one worth optimising. Everything in this product that looks like it is about pool is really about that.