There’s a dirty little secret going on within the online poker world that people do not want you to know about. Nearly all professional player knows about this secret and they have found a way to make the most of 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 on their rate structure it could possibly 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 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. 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.

Although the webmasters aren’t stupid. They realize that the people they may be 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 lots of cases the webmasters will be earning 35% or maybe more of the fees/rake you generate playing on the poker site. And not simply for a month or 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 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 give up 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 several of them decided to produce a new system.

What they said was, « Hey, I will 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. » Now, 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 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 some other perks the site might have offered them for being such the best customer.

Now many people are reading this page and believe that there’s no way they can generate $30,000 a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. Actually, anybody can sign up at these sites. However big or small a player they’re.

And one doesn’t 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 can also play four tables at a time (which is quite doable with some practice) and play 42 hours every week, you might make approximately $76,000 a year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you will be getting about $76,000 each year back.

That is not a bad living for some 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 who shall sack you the second sales drop. You have the freedom to work whenever 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 might have to play either very high stakes or for numerous hours that almost all people would burn out. All as a result of rakeback, being a professional poker player is in the reach of nearly everyone.