Pool glossary
Payout
How the pot is divided between the top finishers.
What it means
The split of prize money by finishing position. Standard practice scales with field size: winner-takes-all for a small field, two places from about six players, three from about twelve, four from about twenty.
Where the word comes from
Tournament vocabulary across every game that pays prizes.
How it sounds at a table
"How's it paying?" "Seventy-thirty."
What it means in a three-strikes night
Pay more than one place as soon as you have six or more players. A winner-takes-all night with twenty entrants means nineteen people go home with nothing, and a good proportion of them do not come back. Paying three places out of a twelve-player field costs the winner some money and buys you a night that still has twelve people at it in March.
The mistake people make
Splitting in percentages that do not land on whole dollars and then arguing about the change. Round each place down to the nearest dollar and give the remainder to first.
Terms that come up alongside it
Written out rather than linked only, because looking up one term usually means you are standing at a table and do not want four more taps.
- Pot
- Two meanings: the prize money, and British for pocketing a ball. In American usage the pot is the total prize money — every buy-in added together.
- Buy-in
- What each player pays to enter. The fixed amount every player puts in to join a tournament.
- House cut
- The share of the pot the venue keeps. A percentage of the entry money retained by the bar, usually to cover table time, a prize, or the cost of running the night.
- Three strikes
- The format: one shot a turn, three misses and you are out. A multi-player elimination format in which players take one shot each in a fixed rotation, lose a life for failing to pocket, and are eliminated at three.
Where it comes up
Payout matters most in three-strikes pool, where a single turn is one shot and the cost of getting something wrong is a life rather than a visit to the table. If you are learning the game, the guide to running a night puts most of this vocabulary in context, and the format pages show which games the term applies to and which it does not.