The question behind the question
Nobody asks about sub-agents when things are quiet. They ask at the point where the book has more players than they can properly hold, and the honest version of the question is not "how do I get more players" but "why is this getting harder."
Worth separating those two, because the answer is usually not the one people want.
Demand is not your bottleneck
There is no shortage of people who want to bet. The regulated US market alone took $38.84 billion of handle in the second quarter of 2026, on the American Gaming Association's figures, and that is only the licensed side of it.
So if you are looking for a growth constraint, it is not that nobody wants to play. It is that a book is a set of relationships, and one person can only hold so many of them well. Attention is what runs out first, and it runs out quietly: limits get reviewed late, a player waits a day for an answer, settlement slides to Tuesday because Monday got away.
Adding players at that point makes all of it worse. Adding a person can fix it.
What a sub-agent actually is
A sub-agent brings their own players and carries them under your book.
They set limits for those players, inside whatever ceiling you allow them. They settle with their own players. Then they settle with you, one number, the same way a player settles with them. Each level sees its own figures and nothing above it, so your sub-agent sees their tree and you see everything.
That structure is what stops a growing book from turning into one person chasing forty people on a Monday. What a weekly settlement looks like covers how the levels stack up at the close of a week.
What you hand over, and what you never do
You hand over the day to day: recruiting, the relationship, the first call when a player has a question, and the collection.
What does not move is the risk. The sub-agent settles with their players, but you settle with the sub-agent, so their judgment about who to take becomes your exposure with one name in front of it. If they take on somebody who cannot pay, that lands on you.
Which is why the sensible pace is slow. One sub-agent you trust completely is worth more than four you are hopeful about, and the limit you set on a sub-agent is a credit decision about them, not about their players. How bookies work makes the same point about taking on a player; it applies harder one level up, because the amounts are bigger.
Signs you are ready, and signs you are not
You are probably ready when the players you already have are getting less of you than they should, when someone is already informally sending you players, and when your settlement day holds without effort.
You are probably not ready if settlement is already slipping, if your limits are one number for everybody, or if the appeal is mainly that a bigger book sounds better. A tree built on a book that is not yet under control multiplies the problem instead of dividing it.
How the deal is usually put together
There is no standard contract for this, and the terms are whatever the two of you agree. Most deals share the same three parts.
The first is the share. A sub-agent normally earns a percentage of what his own players lose over the week, after their winners are paid. The percentage is negotiated, and it tends to be higher for someone who brings many good players and handles his own collecting.
The second is who carries the losses. In some deals the sub-agent shares losing weeks as well as winning ones. In others the operator carries the losses and the sub-agent's earlier results have to cover them before he is paid again. That second arrangement is called make-up.
The third is who collects. If the sub-agent collects from his players and pays you, you depend on him for the money as well as for the players. If you collect directly, he depends on you. Decide it before the first week.
Make-up, with numbers
Make-up is easier to follow in an example. Suppose the deal gives the sub-agent 25 percent of his players' net losses. That figure is only for the arithmetic. Yours will be whatever you agree.
In week one his players lose 2,000. His share is 500.
In week two his players win 1,200. The book is down that amount on his side, so he earns nothing and now carries a make-up of 1,200.
In week three his players lose 1,000. All of it goes against the make-up, which drops to 200. He earns nothing again.
In week four his players lose 900. The first 200 clears the make-up. His share is 25 percent of the remaining 700, which is 175.
Over four weeks his players lost 2,700 in total and he was paid 675. Without make-up he would have been paid on 3,900 of losing weeks and never charged for the winning one. The arrangement exists so that he is paid on what his players lose over time and not on the good weeks alone.
Put these in writing
A page is enough. It should say:
- the share, and what it is a share of;
- whether there is make-up, and whether it ever resets;
- who collects from his players and by which day;
- who sets his players' limits, and what the ceiling is;
- what happens to an unpaid balance from one of his players;
- how either of you ends the arrangement, and what is owed when you do.
That last line gets skipped because nobody wants to plan the ending at the start. It is the one you will want most.
The first month with a sub-agent
Keep it small on purpose.
Start him with a handful of players he already knows, at limits you set. Close the first four weeks with him in person or on a call, going through each of his players' figures together. You are checking two things: whether his players pay, and whether he tells you about problems before you find them yourself.
Raise nothing during that month. If the four closes are clean, let him add players and take more of the limit decisions within a ceiling. If they are not, you have found out cheaply.
Where these arrangements go wrong
The failures look alike from one book to the next.
A sub-agent is given control of limits too early and hands a friend more credit than the book can cover. A deal is agreed on a handshake and remembered differently by each side after the first losing month. Make-up builds until the sub-agent can see no way back to earning, and he leaves with his players instead of working it off. Or the operator stops looking at the sub-agent's players because the weekly figure has been fine.
None of these is about the platform. They come down to whether the two of you agreed on the same deal, and whether you kept watching after it started working.
How the platform handles it
Sub-agents are not a feature you buy separately. Agent management is in both tiers: sub-agents with their own players, their own limits and their own weekly figures, and one view of the whole tree for you. The agent management page shows what that looks like in practice.
Billing does not change shape either. The players a sub-agent brings are billed like any other active player, at $8 a week on Standard and $11 on Pro. So your cost follows how big the book is, not how many levels it has. What the bill is made of has the detail, and the rate card has the numbers.
One last thing worth being clear-eyed about: if a sub-agent leaves, plan on their players leaving with them. The relationship was theirs. That is not a reason to avoid building a tree. It is a reason to keep the people you depend on to a number you can stay genuinely close to.