Announced prize pools are the most quoted number in esports and the least informative. The pool is split across placings, the placing is split with the organisation, the remainder is split across a roster, and what is left is taxable income. Four divisions sit between the headline and a bank account.
This calculator performs all four.
The arithmetic, so you can check it
Every figure is four operations on the pool. Nothing is estimated.
prize = pool × (placing share ÷ sum of all shares)
org cut = prize × (org percentage ÷ 100)
team share = prize − org cut
per player = team share ÷ roster size
after set-aside = per player × (1 − tax percentage ÷ 100)
Work the default values by hand. A pool of $100,000, a top-eight structure, third place at 12%:
- Prize: $100,000 × 0.12 = $12,000
- Organisation cut at 20%: $12,000 × 0.20 = $2,400
- Team share: $12,000 − $2,400 = $9,600
- Split five ways: $9,600 ÷ 5 = $1,920
- After a 30% set-aside: $1,920 × 0.70 = $1,344
A third-place finish at an event advertising a hundred thousand dollars leaves each player with something under fourteen hundred, before travel. Win the whole thing and the same arithmetic gives $40,000 → $32,000 → $6,400 → $4,480, which is 4.48% of the headline figure.
What each input is really representing
The payout structure. The presets are illustrative shapes, not any specific event's terms — always read the actual event rules, which will publish the exact split. The four presets bracket the range you will meet: winner-take-all, a steep top four, a conventional top eight, and a flatter sixteen-place structure that pays deeper into the bracket at the cost of the top prizes. Flatter structures are common where organisers want travel costs covered for more entrants; steep ones are common where the top placing is the story.
The organisation cut. Terms vary enormously and are contractual. Some organisations take nothing from prize money and pay a straight salary; others take a defined percentage against costs they carry — travel, bootcamps, coaching staff, the analyst, the manager. Neither is inherently exploitative; a large cut alongside a real salary and a paid support staff can be a much better deal than a zero cut and no salary. What matters is that the number is written down and that you have read it. Set this field to zero to see the picture for an unattached entrant.
Roster size. Five for most team titles. But the cut above often exists precisely because there are also a coach, an analyst and a manager to pay, and in some agreements they share directly rather than being funded from the organisation's portion. If your split includes staff, put the full number in.
The tax set-aside. Deliberately a user input with no default claim attached to it. Prize money in the US is generally income, tournament organisers may withhold, non-resident competitors face different treatment, and state rules differ. The 30% default is a placeholder to make the shape of the problem visible, not a rate. Talk to someone qualified before you plan around any figure here.
Why this matters more than it looks
Three things fall out of running the numbers a few times.
Prize money is not a salary. It arrives irregularly, is concentrated at the top of a bracket, and is high-variance. A player planning a life around it is running a leveraged bet on their own results, and a team doing the same cannot make payroll commitments. This is a structural feature of the esports economy, not a quirk of any one event.
Deep runs pay for travel and not much else. Flatter structures exist so that entrants outside the top four are not out of pocket. Run the numbers for the lower placings with a realistic org cut and you will see how thin that margin is, and why domestic events with short travel are worth disproportionately more to an unsigned team than the prize table suggests.
The number in the announcement is a marketing figure. Not dishonest — it is genuinely being paid out — but it describes the event's spend, not anyone's income. When you read a career prize-money total for a player, remember that it is the sum of team prizes attributed to individuals, before splits, cuts and tax, and that it is one of the most misleading statistics regularly published about this industry.
For where prize funding comes from in the first place, and why it is not revenue, see where the money actually comes from. For the path that leads to being in a bracket at all, see ladder to roster.