There’s a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that folks do not want you to understand about. Virtually every professional player knows concerning this secret and they have found a way to profit from it. So can you.

Lots of individuals 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 very well be around 5% of the pot value. That fee is called « the rake. »

But that’s not the big secret. The big secret is the fact that you can get a sizable number of that money back!

Online poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over around $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 aren’t stupid. They know that the individuals they can be sending to visit the next website 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 just 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, you’ll 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 didn’t want to quit any of their cut and so they threatened the poker rooms to keep quite about how much money they were making. Though the smart players already knew. And several of them decided to create 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 will give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service. » Essentially, in the event that you do the math, the very best level guys generating thirty thousand dollars a month in rake all of a sudden were receiving 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 any other perks the site might have offered them for being such an excellent customer.

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

And one does not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes in order 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 extremely doable with some practice) and play 42 hours every week, you might make approximately $76,000 per year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you would be getting about seventy six thousand dollars over a year back.

That is not much of 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 who shall 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 very high stakes or for a lot of hours that lots of people would burn out. All because of rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everybody.