There’s a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that men and women don’t want you to learn about. Almost every professional player knows about this secret and they’ve found a way to benefit from it. So can you.

Lots of people are unaware that whenever you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based upon 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 can get a big percentage of that money back!

quality online poker gambling poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over anywhere between $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 particular poker site.

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

But then the leading players – individuals who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, there are actually people paying $30,000+ every month in rake every month) – started to wonder why these webmasters were making all of this money in the event 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 the amount of money they were making. Although the smart players already knew. And many of them decided to create a 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. » In essence, in the event you do the math, the very best level guys generating $30,000 a month in rake all of a sudden were getting a windfall $9,900 a month back! That is over and above anything they might have won at the table, bonuses the site may have offered, or any other perks the site might have offered them for being such a good customer.

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

And one does not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes so that you can make a respectable income from playing poker. By way of example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker as well as can play four tables at a time (which is very doable with some practice) and play 42 hours a week, you can make approximately seventy six thousand dollars per year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you would be getting about seventy six thousand dollars each year back.

That’s not just a bad living for many 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 who shall sack you the second sales drop. You have the freedom to work when you want and just as much as you want.

But if you had to do it just on your winnings alone you could never get there. You could have to play either quite high stakes or for numerous hours that almost all people would burn out. All due to rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everyone.