There is a dirty little secret going on within the online poker world that individuals do not want you to learn about. Nearly all professional player knows about this secret and they have found a way to benefit from it. So can you.
A lot of men and women are unaware that whenever you play quality online poker casino poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based on their rate structure it may 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 may get a sizable portion 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 own sites to entice you to play on that specific poker site.
However the webmasters aren’t stupid. They realize that the people they’re sending to the 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 are earning 35% or maybe more of the fees/rake you generate playing on the poker site. And not only for a month or possibly 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, you can find people paying $30,000+ each 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 the amount of money they were making. Though the smart players already knew. And many of them decided to produce 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 will give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service. » Generally, in the event you do the math, the very best level guys generating $30,000 a month in rake all of a sudden were obtaining 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 every other perks the site might have offered them for being such an excellent customer.
Now the majority of people are reading this and feel 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. No matter how big or small a player they can be.
And one does not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes as a way to make a respectable income from playing poker. By way of example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and may play four tables at a time (which is very doable with some practice) and play 42 hours every week, you could make approximately seventy six thousand dollars each year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you could 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 annual take gets even larger.
Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer which will sack you the second sales drop. You have the freedom to work whenever 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 extremely high stakes or for so many hours that almost all people would burn out. All due to rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everybody.