There is a dirty little secret going on within the online poker world that folks don’t want you to know about. Nearly all professional player knows concerning this secret and they’ve found a way to cash in on it. So can you.

Lots of people are unaware that any time you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based on their rate structure it may be just as much as 5% of the pot value. That fee is called « the rake. »

But that is not the big secret. The big secret is that you may get a big percentage of that money back!

Online poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over ranging from $1 million – $3 million a day. Their biggest cost is acquiring new customers. One of the ways they get new customers is to pay webmasters to put ad banners and links on their own sites to entice you to play on that specific poker site.

Though the webmasters aren’t stupid. They realize that individuals they are sending to the poker room might generate hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees or rake and they have shrewdly negotiated profit sharing deals with the poker sites. In many cases the webmasters will be earning 35% or more of the fees/rake you generate playing on the poker site. And not only for a month or a year but for as long as you’re a customer!

But then the leading players – people who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you will find people paying $30,000+ every month in rake every month) – started to wonder why these webmasters were making all of this money when the player was the one actually generating the rake.

The greedy webmasters did not want to quit any of their cut and so they threatened the poker rooms to keep quite about how much money they were making. However the smart players already knew. And several of them decided to produce a brand new system.

What they said was, « Hey, I’ll be a webmaster too. And should the poker room is paying me 35% I’ll give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service. » Simply, should you the math, the top level guys generating $30,000 a month in rake all of a sudden were getting a windfall $9,900 a month back! That’s over and above anything they might have won at the table, bonuses the site may have offered, or every other perks the site might have offered them for being such a great customer.

Now the majority of people are reading this and believe that there’s no way they may generate $30,000 a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. As a matter of fact, anybody can sign up at these sites. However big or small a player they are.

And one does not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes to be able to make a respectable income from playing poker. By way of example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and also can play four tables at a time (which is quite doable with some practice) and play 42 hours every week, you might make approximately seventy six thousand dollars over a year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you will be getting about $76,000 over a year back.

That is not a bad living for most people. And if you play higher stakes, more hours, more tables, or actually win money playing poker then your total annual take gets even larger.

Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer that will sack you the next sales drop. You’ve got the freedom to work whenever you want and around you want.

But if you had to do it just on your winnings alone you might never get there. You would have to play either extremely high stakes or for a lot of hours that the majority of people would burn out. All thanks to rakeback, being a professional poker player is in the reach of nearly everybody.