Poker Staking Makeup Terms: Carry, Reset, and the Floor

If you already understand what makeup is — the running debt you owe a backer, the losses they cover that you have to earn back before you see profit — then you understand the arithmetic. What you may not understand yet is that the arithmetic is the easy part. Makeup, as a concept, is bookkeeping. Makeup, as a set of contract terms, is where entire staking careers are quietly decided. Two players can be on identical splits, running identical results, and one walks free in eighteen months while the other is buried under a number he'll never climb — because their makeup terms were different, and one of them read the word that ran the whole deal and one of them didn't.

So the question players type into a search bar — does poker makeup reset? — turns out to be exactly the right question. Here's what the answer actually decides.

Carry versus reset

The first term to nail down is whether makeup carries or resets.

Carry means the debt follows you. Every losing session adds to a balance that persists — across months, often across sites, sometimes across game types. There's no clock. You owe until you've earned it all back, however long that takes. Most staking deals carry, and carry isn't inherently predatory; it's just the default, and it means the debt is patient. It waits for you.

Reset means the balance zeroes out on some trigger — a calendar period, the end of a series, a fresh agreement. A monthly reset, for instance, means a brutal January doesn't chase you into February; you start February at zero. Resets protect the player, because they cap how much history can pile onto your back at once. They're rarer, and a backer who offers one is offering you real downside protection, so notice it and value it.

The point isn't that one is good and one is bad. The point is that this single term — does it carry or does it reset — is often left unstated, and the unstated default is carry-forever, and carry-forever is the version most likely to become a trap. If nobody tells you, assume it carries, and ask.

The stop-loss, and why a floor is everything

Now the term that matters even more than carry-versus-reset, and that far fewer players ask about: the stop-loss, or floor.

A stop-loss caps how deep your makeup can go in a given stretch. Say you and your backer agree on a floor of five buy-ins on a session, or a monthly downswing cap. Once you hit it, you stop — the bleeding is contained, the debt has a bottom. Without a floor, a downswing runs unbounded. One genuinely terrible run — the kind every winning player eats eventually, through no fault of their own — can dig a hole so deep that no realistic amount of good play climbs out of it.

This is the difference between a bad month and a life sentence. With a floor, the worst case is defined; you can look at it, survive it, and keep playing. Without a floor, the worst case is undefined, and an undefined worst case in a game with real variance is how a competent, disciplined player ends up working off a debt to a house forever, sending most of every winning session up against a balance he can't outrun. A floor doesn't just protect your bankroll. It protects your ability to ever leave.

The word that runs the whole deal: compound

Here is the term that has ended more staking relationships than every cooler and bad beat combined, and it's a single word: compound.

Makeup that compounds grows on itself. The exact mechanism varies — sometimes it's an interest-like charge on the outstanding balance, sometimes it's structured so that fees or costs fold back into the debt — but the effect is always the same: the number climbs in the bad months faster than you can cut it in the good ones. Combine compounding with no reset and no floor, and you have built a machine that produces exactly one output: a player who works for free and is grateful for the chance.

Picture it plainly. A single savage year buries you under a figure. It compounds while you're down, so it grows even as you grind. There's no reset to wipe it and no floor to have capped it. Now you send up most of every winning session against a balance that gets deeper in every losing stretch, and you cannot leave, because leaving means walking away from the makeup and burning your name in a small world that remembers. You are no longer a partner. You're a man working off a debt to a house.

That player read his split. He never read the word compound, and that one word was the whole deal. If you take nothing else from this: find out, in writing, whether your makeup compounds, and if it does, understand that no split good enough exists to make an uncapped compounding debt safe.

The three terms decide everything together

Carry, floor, and compounding don't act alone — they interact, and it's the combination that determines your fate.

Makeup that carries but has a real floor and doesn't compound is a normal, survivable deal: the debt is patient but bounded, and a bad run has a defined bottom you can climb back from. Makeup that resets is even friendlier. But makeup that carries forever, has no floor, and compounds is the trap in its purest form — three ordinary-looking clauses that combine into a door built to open one way. None of the three looks alarming on its own. That's precisely why they get signed. The player admiring his split never lays the three side by side and asks what they do together, and the person who wrote the contract already did, on the afternoon the player was still admiring the split.

Ask before you sign, not from inside

Every one of these terms is legible at the beginning. The compounding, the missing floor, the carry-forever — all of it is right there in the structure on the day you sign, available to anyone who drags his eyes off the split and asks the harder questions. From inside the deal, once you're deep, asking them only produces despair; the terms just tell you, precisely, how it ends.

So ask at the threshold, while asking still has power. Does the makeup carry or reset? Is there a stop-loss, a floor, a cap on how deep I can go? Does it compound in any form? These are not hostile questions. A backer running a clean operation answers them plainly and is often relieved you understand the mechanics. The one who goes vague when you say the word compound has just told you more than any clause could. How a person answers the endgame questions is itself the most reliable term in the contract.

Makeup is simple arithmetic. The terms around it are not simple at all — they're the difference between a partnership and a sentence — and that's the part worth reading slowly, out loud, before you sign.

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This article draws on the staking guide. Read the Deal to Its End — the full story, with the history, in the audio chapter.