There is a dirty little secret going on within the good online gambling site poker world that men and women don’t want you to learn about. Nearly every professional player knows about this secret and they have found a way to make the most of it. So can you.

Many individuals are unaware that any time you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based upon their rate structure it could possibly be around 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 large number of that money back!

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

However the webmasters are not stupid. They know that the individuals they can 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 lots of 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 perhaps a year but for as long as you are a customer!

But then the leading players – folks who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, there are people paying $30,000+ monthly 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 didn’t want to give up 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 several of them decided to generate a new system.

What they said was, « Hey, I will become a webmaster too. And in the event the poker room is paying me 35% I will give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service. » Essentially, in the event you do the math, the top level guys generating thirty thousand dollars 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 some other perks the site might have offered them for being such the best customer.

Now many people are reading this and assume that there is no way also they can generate $30,000 a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. Actually, anyone can sign up at these sites. Regardless how big or small a player they are.

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

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

Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer who will sack you the next 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 would have to play either extremely high stakes or for numerous hours that almost all people would burn out. All thanks to rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everybody.