Dividing player pay
Meistro said:
What is the general rule for when multiple players are playing off the same bank? Do you split profits, pay based on expectation? Obviously variance must be accounted for somehow.
The ideal bank structure IMHO is identical investments, identical time commitments, identical actual playing hours in games of identical value, identical (positive) results, and when it's done you split the money up equally. Simple!
In reality it's never that tidy. I guess you're just asking about splitting up the players' share among players -- bear in mind that deciding how the players' and investors' shares will be calculated is very important too, probably the most crucial aspect to divvying results. Investors can go broke in a hurry if the terms of the split aren't right. And then you won't have any team.
In terms of the players' share: I don't know that there are general rules. People have tried multitudes of arrangements. On the team I was active with for years, the players' share was divided among players based purely on casino hours. Extraordinary performance -- usually meaning large positive results -- was reflected via a bonus pool calculated according to a fixed formula. (The size of the pool was calculated in a predetermined way. The distribution of the pool was left entirely to the managers' discretion.) This was possible because the team had strong central management to whom players deferred. Without that kind of leadership I could see an elective bonus system leading to disputes and unpleasantness.
Often we ran small banks with just a few players of pretty much equal skill, and when we did banks of that kind, there was no bonus pool. We regarded each other as equals, accepted that some of us would win and others would lose, that some would get down successfully for many hours and others would not be so fortunate, and that our respective player-side pay would differ accordingly. We accepted this. It's gambling. And because we played regularly together we understood that near-term inequalities in the player pay would be smoothed out over time.