If you spend any time around staking, you will hear two words that sound almost identical: markup and makeup. They are completely different things, and the difference matters a lot.
Markup is a premium on the buy-in. A player with a real edge charges a bit more than face value for a piece of their action, because over the long run that edge is worth paying for. A 1.2× markup means you pay 120% of the buy-in cost for your percentage. It is a clean, upfront number: you know exactly what you are paying and why.
That is the model Pebel uses.
Makeup is something else entirely, and it belongs to long-term backing deals. In those arrangements, a backer funds a player across many events, and the player carries a running loss forward — the "makeup" — until future winnings clear it. The player does not see a profit split until they have dug themselves out of the hole.
In theory it aligns incentives. In practice, makeup is where most staking relationships go to die.
Picture a player buried in makeup after a cold stretch. Every session now feels like working off a debt rather than playing their own game. Motivation drains. Meanwhile the backer is sitting on an IOU with no clear end date, watching for a profit that keeps receding. Resentment builds on both sides. Deals that started as a handshake end in arguments about money that was never quite clearly defined.
The whole structure depends on a long, trusting relationship and a lot of goodwill. When either runs out — and over enough events, one usually does — it gets ugly.
Pebel uses markup instead, and every listing is a clean, self-contained deal. You buy a percentage of a specific tournament or series. You win or lose on that alone. When it settles, you walk away — no running tab, no debt carried between events, no makeup to argue about.
That is a deliberate design choice, not an oversight. The point of Pebel is to know exactly where a deal stands the moment it is over. A self-contained deal can be settled, recorded, and closed. A makeup balance is an open-ended relationship that has to be managed, trusted, and eventually disputed.
We think the simpler model is also the healthier one. You get the upside of backing a skilled player without signing up for an indefinite financial entanglement. When the tournament is done, so is the deal.
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