How to Start a Poker Club on X Poker or PPPoker in 2026
Starting a poker club on X Poker or PPPoker takes about an hour. The registration is simple, there is no startup capital required, and your first game can run the same day. What most new club owners do not figure out until month three is that the registration was never the problem.
How Do I Create a Poker Club?
Registration itself takes minutes: install the app, open the club section, create a club and receive a Club ID. That part is not where owners fail.
- Pick the platform by region. X Poker for Southeast Asia and Australia, PPPoker for Brazil and Latin America, ClubGG for Asia.
- Create the club in the app. You receive a numeric Club ID immediately.
- Set your rake and stakes. Offer more than one stake level from the start.
- Arrange chip handling and payouts. Balances flow through the owner, not the platform.
- Connect to a union early. Before the club builds a reputation for empty tables.
On X Poker, you create a club from the main menu after registering an account. Set a club name, choose whether to require approval for new members, configure your game settings. PPPoker works the same way. No approval process, no minimum player count, no deposit from you personally.
Chips work through a deposit system. Your players send you money, you buy diamonds inside the app, and those diamonds convert to chips that go into player accounts. You never front the chips yourself. The club bankroll comes entirely from player deposits, which means your financial exposure is zero if you run things properly.
Within an hour of creating the club you can have a table running.
What Is the Hardest Part of Running a New Poker Club?
Filling the tables. A new club typically has under 50 active players, which is not enough concurrent traffic to keep games running when the regulars log off.
You have 35 members. Recruitment took weeks. On a Friday night, 6 of them are online at the same time.
Six players cannot sustain consistent games. They fill one table if you are lucky. Players sit around waiting for action, get bored, and start playing somewhere else. A few weeks of this and they stop logging in altogether. Within a few months the club is dead, and the owner thinks the problem was their marketing or their player base.
It was not. It was pool size. A club with 35 members will always have this problem. Even a club with 200 members hits quiet periods at off-peak hours. The lobby goes dead, and a dead lobby drives away the players you worked to recruit.
What Does a Poker Union Do for a New Club?
It connects your club to a shared player pool across many clubs, so your members find active games immediately instead of waiting for your own players to show up.
A poker union, sometimes called an alliance, connects your club to a network of other clubs on the same platform. Your players see tables from across the entire network, not just tables started by your own members.
On X Poker, a healthy union runs around 40 active tables at any given time across the network. On PPPoker, around 20. When your 6 online players log in on a quiet Tuesday, they find games running at multiple stakes because those tables are being filled by players from dozens of other clubs. They play. You collect rake on their action, including hands at tables other clubs started.
The lobby stops looking dead. Players stop leaving. A club that was bleeding members in month three starts growing instead.
X Poker or PPPoker: Which Should a New Club Choose?
It depends on your region. X Poker carries the heavier traffic in Southeast Asia and Australia, PPPoker is stronger across Brazil and Latin America.
Both platforms work well and the union model runs on both. The player bases are different.
X Poker has its strongest player base in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines. Filipino players run consistent long sessions, which produces reliable table traffic during Asian hours. If your players are in that region, X Poker fits better.
PPPoker is the dominant platform in Brazil and Latin America. Brazilian players are aggressive and fast-paced, which drives high hand volume per hour. If your network is in LATAM, PPPoker is the natural choice.
You can operate on both platforms. Some club owners start on one and expand once the first is stable.
What Commission Should a New Club Expect to Pay?
The market runs 15 to 20 percent of union rake. TOP UNION charges 7 percent on X Poker and PPPoker, and 15 percent on ClubGG.
When you join a union, the union takes a percentage of the rake generated through your club. Market rates run between 15% and 20%. Some unions charge more. Get the commission rate in writing before committing to anything, and ask how payouts work. Weekly settlements are the standard. Not every union follows through consistently.
The difference between 7% and 15% is significant once your club is generating real volume. Do the math before you pick a union.
When Should a New Club Join a Union?
As early as possible. The reputation for empty tables is much harder to reverse than to avoid, so connecting before players drift away is cheaper than winning them back.
Before you hit the wall of empty tables, not after. The time to connect is when you launch the club, not when you have already lost half your active players to a bigger network.
Most club owners come to this conclusion on their own after two or three months of fighting the liquidity problem. The ones who figure it out early skip that part entirely.