Should players who did not pay be counted in the split?

No. Size the split by the field that turned up, but calculate the pot only from money actually collected. Someone who never paid should not inflate what the winner expects.

What if two players tie?

In three strikes nobody can tie — eliminations happen one at a time, so there is always an order. In a bracket, split the two places evenly and round to the dollar.

Is it legal for the bar to take a cut?

It depends entirely on where you are, and it is worth five minutes of checking before the first night rather than after. A venue profiting from a players' pot is treated differently from a venue charging a table fee in some jurisdictions.

How to split a pool tournament pot

There is no governing body for this and no single right answer. There is a convention that almost everyone uses, and a few rules about rounding that save arguments. Here is both, with the arithmetic done.

The standard splits

Payout structures scale with the size of the field. Pay too few places with a big field and most of the room goes home empty; pay too many with a small one and winning is worth nothing.

Players	Places	Split	Reasoning
2–5	1	100%	Too small to divide meaningfully.
6–11	2	70 / 30	Second place gets their buy-in back and a bit.
12–19	3	50 / 30 / 20	A podium. Roughly a quarter of the field is paid.
20+	4	40 / 30 / 20 / 10	First still wins properly; the tail is wide enough to matter.

Worked examples

16 players at $5, no house cut. Pot is $80. Three places at 50/30/20 gives $40, $24, $16. Clean, no rounding needed.

22 players at $10, no house cut. Pot is $220. Four places at 40/30/20/10 gives $88, $66, $44, $22.

13 players at $5, 15% house cut. Pot is $65. The house takes $9.75, leaving $55.25. Three places gives $27.62, $16.57, $11.05 — which is where rounding earns its keep.

Round down, and give the remainder to first

A bar pays out in notes. Counting out sixty-two cents in front of a room is a bad look and takes longer than you think.

So: round every place down to a whole dollar, then give whatever is left over to first place. Taking the awkward example above — $55.25 prize pool, three places — you get $27, $16 and $11, which is $54. The remaining $1.25 goes to first, who takes $28.25. Call it $28 and put the quarter in the tip jar.

Why first and not evenly? Because first place is the only person nobody will object to receiving a rounding error, and splitting a dollar three ways is how you get back to counting change.

The house cut

Most bars running a successful weekly take nothing. The tournament is a promotion; the money is made on drinks. A twenty-person night at two drinks a head is worth considerably more than fifteen per cent of a hundred dollar pot.

If you do take a cut, three rules:

Announce it before anybody pays. Every week. The amount is almost never the problem — being surprised by it always is.
Take it off the top, not off the winner. Calculate the cut from the whole pot, then split what is left.
Ten to twenty per cent is the normal range. Above twenty-five and people start running their night somewhere else.

One genuinely worthwhile use of a cut: feeding the table. A coin-op bar box at a dollar a rack through twelve racks is a real cost, and "the cut pays for the table" is a sentence nobody argues with.

Alternatives worth knowing

Buy-in back for second. Instead of a percentage, second place simply gets their entry returned and first takes the rest. Clean, easy to explain, and it works well with small fields.

Last-one-in gets a drink. Pay the top two or three in cash and give the first player eliminated a beer. It costs the bar almost nothing and it is remembered far longer than a $12 third prize.

A rolling jackpot. Hold back ten per cent each week into a pot that pays out at the end of a season. It gives people a reason to come every week rather than just the weeks they feel like it — but only do this if you are certain you will still be running the night in three months.