What is Rake?

Has it ever occurred to you how the online poker rooms make their money? You sit at an online poker room such as Full Tilt Poker and play hand after hand, raking all that money in with the biggest of smiles on your face. The online poker rooms seem to be missing out, allowing all the players to sit at their tables and play for what seems to be free of charge while the players rake in big pots. It is as if you found a great deal; the one place where the casinos and poker rooms do not have an edge on your money.

Well, do not get too far ahead of yourself. What you seem to be missing is the small percentage of every pot that the poker rooms and casino keep for themselves. This is known as the "rake." The amount of rake that every poker room varies as each room has their own guidelines. Some rooms will base their rake depending on the stakes you play while others will base it on the number of players in the pot. And some online poker rooms go as far as combining the size of the stakes and the number of players in the pot to calculate what their rake will be.

However they decide to do it, you will be paying anywhere from 3-5% per pot in rake on average. And although this may not seem like a lot of money, you need to remember that it is easy to play up to 100 or more hands in an hour online. This can easily make the poker rooms anywhere from $1-$500 per hour. It is important to note that a few online poker rooms do have a "no flop, no drop" policy which means that if a hand does not go to the flop then no rake is paid.

In tournaments, the rake that is being taken is a bit more obvious. For example, let's say that you are signing up to a $5 + $.50 Sit n Go. The money that the poker rooms make is the $.50 fee that is tacked on. This of course is on the low end of the scale with fees being as high as $200 for $5,500 buy ins. With Sit n Go's starting constantly, it should now be obvious how an online poker room or casino does so well.

So now the big question is how much money do you pay in rake? If you are a recreational player it may not be that much, but for a player who plays a couple hours a day you could easily be paying several hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month.

There is a simple way to figure it out. Let's assume you were playing at Aced Poker in a ring game where they take $.01 in rake for every $.20 in the pot with a maximum of $3.00. You just finished with a hand and there is $15.00 in the pot before any rake was taken. How much did you actually earn?

There are actually 2 different ways to figure this out. The first thing you can do is take the amount that is in the pot and divide that by the amount that is the minimum for them to take rake. In this case, that is $.20. So this is what your equation would look like:

$15.00/$.20= $.75 of rake taken

The other way to look at it is to figure out how much rake the room takes per dollar and multiply that number by the amount that is in the pot. Here is what that equation would look like:

$1.00/$.20 (minimum pot for rake taken) = .05
.05*$.01(rake per $.20) = $.05 rake taken per $1
$15.00 in the pot*$.05 rake per dollar= $.75 rake taken

So after using the following equation, you found that only $.75 was taken in rake leaving you to scoop $14.25 in chips.

Now, the numbers in the equation may change from hand to hand, and some rooms have several different amount of rake that they take. This will depend on many things we mentioned above such as amount of players in the pot and the stakes you are playing. Be sure to look these numbers up.

The money that the online poker rooms make adds up very quickly. If there were only a way you can get some of that money back. You might actually become a break-even player or better yet, a winning player. Well, you are in luck. Because little did you know you can make some of that money back. In fact, depending on the room, you can make almost 30-40% back.