There’s a dirty little secret Going In this article on in the online poker world that individuals don’t want you to understand about. Virtually every 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 any time you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based upon their rate structure it could be around 5% of the pot value. That fee is called « the rake. »

But that is not the big secret. The big secret is that you can get a large number 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 own sites to entice you to play on that particular poker site.

But the webmasters aren’t stupid. They realize that the individuals 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 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 only for a month or perhaps a year but for as long as you are a customer!

But then the leading players – men and women who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you will find people paying $30,000+ per 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 quit 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 several of them decided to create a whole new system.

What they said was, « Hey, I will 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 $30,000 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 every other perks the site might have offered them for being such the best customer.

Now most of the people are reading this and feel that there is no way also they can generate $30,000 a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. In reality, anyone can sign up at these sites. Irrespective of how big or small a player they can be.

And one will not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes so that you can make a respectable income from playing poker. As an example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and will play four tables at a time (which is extremely doable with some practice) and play 42 hours per week, you may make approximately $76,000 each year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you would be getting about seventy six thousand dollars per year back.

That is not really 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 who shall sack you the next sales drop. You’ve got 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 quite high stakes or for a lot of hours that most of the people would burn out. All as a result of rakeback, being a professional poker player is in the reach of nearly everyone.