There is a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that people do not want you to understand about. Nearly every professional player knows about this secret and they have found a way to cash in on it. So can you.
Lots of individuals are unaware that whenever you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based upon their rate structure it may very well be as much as 5% of the pot value. That fee is called « the rake. »
But that is not the big secret. The big secret is the fact that you may get a big portion 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 sites to entice you to play on that specific poker site.
However the webmasters aren’t stupid. They know that individuals they can 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 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’re a customer!
But then the leading players – those that generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you’ll 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 the amount of money they were making. Although the smart players already knew. And many of them decided to create a whole new system.
What they said was, « Hey, I will become 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. » Simply, in the event you do the math, the very best level guys generating $30,000 a month in rake all of a sudden were receiving 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 any other perks the site might have offered them for being such a great customer.
Now most people are reading this and feel that there’s no way also they can generate thirty thousand dollars 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 are.
And one will not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes as a way to make a respectable income from playing poker. As an example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker as well as can play four tables at a time (which can be very doable with some practice) and play 42 hours per week, you might make approximately seventy six thousand dollars each year just on rakeback. Even when you never won a penny at please click the up coming post tables you could be getting about seventy six thousand dollars each year back.
That is not only 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 which will sack you the other sales drop. You have 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 could never get there. You could have to play either very high stakes or for so many hours that the majority of people would burn out. All because of rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everybody.