There is a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that individuals don’t want you to understand about. Virtually every professional player knows concerning this secret and they have 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. Based upon their rate structure it may 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 large portion of that money back!
Online poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over which range from $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.
But the webmasters are not stupid. They know that people 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 several 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 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 will find people paying $30,000+ a month in rake every month) – started to wonder why these webmasters were making all of this money in the event 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. However the smart players already knew. And many of them decided to produce a new system.
What they said was, « Hey, I will become 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. » Fundamentally, 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 is 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 click the following internet page best customer.
Now most of the people are reading this and assume that there is no way they can generate thirty thousand dollars a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. In reality, anyone can sign up at these sites. Regardless of how big or small a player they are.
And one will not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes to be able to make a respectable income from playing poker. For example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and may play four tables at a time (which is extremely doable with some practice) and play 42 hours per week, you might make approximately seventy six thousand dollars each year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you would be getting about $76,000 over a year back.
That’s not a bad living for many 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 that will sack you the next sales drop. You’ve got the freedom to work whenever you want and around 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 very high stakes or for a lot of hours that the majority of people would burn out. All as a result of rakeback, being a professional poker player is in the reach of nearly everyone.