There’s a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that individuals do not want you to learn about. Almost every professional player knows concerning this secret and they have 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. Determined by their rate structure it might be just as much as 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 big percentage of that money back!

Online 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. 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.

But the webmasters aren’t stupid. They know that the individuals they are 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 many cases the webmasters are earning 35% or even 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 – those who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you’ll find people paying $30,000+ a 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 give up 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 many of them decided to create a whole new system.

What they said was, « Hey, I’ll be 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. » Generally, in the event that you do the math, the top level guys generating thirty thousand dollars a month in rake all of a sudden were acquiring 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 the best online poker gambling 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. As a matter of fact, anybody can sign up at these sites. Regardless of how big or small a player they may be.

And one doesn’t 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 and can also play four tables at a time (which can be very doable with some practice) and play 42 hours per 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 is not only a bad living for some people. And if you play higher stakes, more hours, more tables, or actually win money playing poker then your yearly take gets even larger.

Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer whom shall sack you the second sales drop. You have the freedom to work when you want and 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 a lot of people would burn out. All due to rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everyone.