Final Table Deal Making

Final table deal making occurs both in live games and online; it involves all remaining players in a poker tournament agreeing to split the prize fund between themselves, finishing the tournament early. It's commonplace for the tournament director at Brick & Mortar cardrooms to make the players at the final table aware that dealmaking is an option.

Should you find yourself being propositioned by your fellow final table opponents as to whether you'd be prepared to make a deal, consider that deals don't necessarily mean the prize money has to be split evenly. Two factors that warrant bargaining for a greater percentage of the payout are your level of skill and chipstack size; if you rate yourself as one of the better players at the final table then request you get a bigger share, if you have more chips than your opponents then definitely ask for a share which reasonably reflects your chip advantage.

Making deals benefits the majority of players, mainly because they don't have either a chip advantage or a skill advantage, but for the small amount of players who possess a significant skill edge over their opponents, or a big chip advantage over the field, playing for 1st or 2nd prize money is the more sensible option, because both would provide much larger payouts than if the prize pool was chopped five ways between the final five players.