The poker rake

As a complete beginner, you should always start your online poker adventure at the play money tables. While these tables may not teach you much strategy-wise, they will make sure you learn the game rules properly and that you become familiar with the user-interface too. One more thing: if you cannot beat the play money tables consistently, you’re probably not ready to move on to real money just yet.

Anyway, it won’t be long before your ongoing poker education requires you to leave the play money tables and get some real money experience under your belt.

Once you begin playing at the real money tables, you’ll be confronted with 2 distinct hurdles: one of them is the fact that you’ll be playing against much better opposition and games will be much tighter, the other is the rake. The poker rake is a formidable opponent for players of all skill levels and understanding how it works is the first step towards knowing how to circumvent its negative effects.

An online poker room makes its money through the rake. The rake is a small amount of money taken off each real money pot. In general terms, poker rooms take about 5% of each pot, up to a maximum of $3, but this percentage may be bigger on higher stakes and some of the micro limits may not feature any rake at all. Some poker rooms take more rake on the same limits than others.
Regardless of how you turn it around, the rake is a constant leak in your poker winnings, taking a good bite out of them when you are indeed a winner and making your losses worse when you’re a loser.

One common misconception among rookies regarding the rake is that it is only the winner of the pot who pays the rake. After all, the pot is his and the rake comes off that doesn’t it? Not exactly… The pot doesn’t really belong to the winner until after it’s been raked. It is raked first then given to the winner. Before being raked it is a standalone entity at the table, one that all those who have put money into the pot have equity in. That means the rake is in fact paid by all those who put money into the pot, regardless of whether or not they turn out to be winners or losers at the end of the hand. If you put money into the pot, you’ll pay rake alright…

This fact is also reflected by the different rake calculation methods poker rooms use. The dealt rake method (which distributes the generated rake among all those who were dealt in) is the least accurate method because it assumes everyone who gets cards pays rake.

The contributed rake method is closer to the truth because it only distributes rake-contribution among those who have actively taken part in the hand, that is, put money into the pot. This is still not a 100% accurate way to determine individual rake contributions because some people put more money in there than others.

The weighted contributed rake calculation method is the way to accurately determine who gets the most credit for the generated rake. This method awards the most contributed rake to the player who put the most money into the pot. It is a proportional rake calculation method: if you put more money into the pot you get credit for more contributed rake, if you put less, you get less rake.

Rakeback and prop deals represent some of the solutions you can adopt in your battle against the rake. Generous sign-up bonuses, cashback deals and various value-added promotions are also efficient ways to claim some of your rake back.