There’s a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that folks don’t want you to understand about. Almost every professional player knows about this secret and they’ve found a way to cash in on it. So can you.
A lot of men and women 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 could possibly be 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 that you may get a sizable percentage 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. One of 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 specific poker site.
Though the webmasters aren’t stupid. They realize 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 many cases the webmasters will be 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 – individuals that 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 read this blog article from http://www.thelascopress.com 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 how much money they were making. Although the smart players already knew. And many of them decided to create a brand new system.
What they said was, « Hey, I’ll be a webmaster too. And if the poker room is paying me 35% I’ll give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service. » Now, if you do the math, the very best 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 every other perks the site might have offered them for being such an excellent customer.
Now most individuals are reading this and think that there’s no way they may generate thirty thousand dollars a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. Actually, anyone can sign up at these sites. Regardless of how big or small a player they can be.
And one will 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 and may play four tables at a time (which is quite doable with some practice) and play 42 hours per week, you could make approximately seventy six thousand dollars over a year just on rakeback. Even when you never won a penny at the tables you would be getting about seventy six thousand dollars per year back.
That is not just a bad living for most people. And if you play higher stakes, more hours, more tables, or actually win money playing poker then your once-a-year take gets even larger.
Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer who shall sack you the other sales drop. You’ve got 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 might never get there. You could have to play either quite high stakes or for so many hours that a lot of people would burn out. All due to rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everybody.