$1/$2 Live Rake in 2026: The Real Bankroll Math

Somewhere between the pandemic reopening and now, $7 out of the middle became $8, and nobody sent a memo. Players in Vegas have been reporting that Horseshoe Las Vegas moved to a $6+$2 structure, with similar moves reported at MGM properties — the kind of change that reads as a rounding error and plays like a tax hike. Depending on whether you count the promo drop, that’s somewhere between a 14% and 20% increase.

The mechanics matter here. A “$5+$2” rake means a $5 cap on the house rake plus a separate $2 promotional drop, usually taken once the pot reaches $10, with the normal rake running 10% — a dollar per $10 in the pot until the cap. That means at $1/$2, almost every pot that sees a flop gets fully raked. The cap isn’t a ceiling you rarely touch; it’s the default.

Run the arithmetic. Thirty hands an hour, call it $6 average dropped per hand once you account for the walks and folded blinds, and your table is bleeding roughly $180 an hour into the box. Split nine ways: about $20 per player, per hour. Add dealer tokes — three pots won an hour at a buck each — and you’re at $23. In big blinds, that’s a hair under 12bb/hour of pure friction before a single card is dealt.

So a “good” live reg winning 8bb/hour net is actually beating the table for 20bb/hour gross. That’s an enormous edge, and it exists only because $1/$2 lineups are genuinely bad. The second that stops being true — the second the table has three competent regs instead of one — the game is unbeatable at $8 a pot.

Bankroll accordingly. Live variance sits around 90bb/100 hands, and a thinner post-rake win rate stretches your downswings. Thirty buy-ins used to be a fine number for $300-cap $1/$2. In 2026, budget forty: $12,000. Not because you’re worse, but because your EV per hand is smaller and the noise hasn’t shrunk with it.

Two adjustments actually move the needle: play more pots in position where you can win uncontested, and stop flatting garbage multiway — the multiway math is uglier than most people assume. If you want a live-specific framework, the one laid out in Ed Miller’s The Course still holds up, and SplitSuit’s breakdown of live cash realities is a useful sanity check on what rooms are actually charging.

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