There’s a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that people do not want you to learn about. Almost every professional player knows concerning this secret and they’ve found a way to benefit from it. So can you.

Lots of individuals are unaware that any time you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Determined by their rate structure it may be just 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 can get a big portion of that money back!

Online poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over ranging from $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 sites to entice you to play on that specific 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 several cases the webmasters will be earning 35% or maybe more of the fees/rake you generate playing on the poker site. And not just for a month or perhaps a year but for as long as you are a customer!

But then the leading players – individuals who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you will discover people paying $30,000+ every 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 give up any of their cut and so they threatened the poker rooms to keep quite about how much money they were making. But the smart players already knew. And here. several of them decided to create a new system.

What they said was, « Hey, I’ll 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. » Fundamentally, in the event 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 the best customer.

Now many people are reading this and believe that there is no way they can generate $30,000 a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. In all reality, anybody 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 in order to make a respectable income from playing poker. For example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and can play four tables at a time (which is quite 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 the tables you could be getting about $76,000 a year back.

That is not really 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 which will sack you your second sales drop. You have the freedom to work when you want and as much as 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 numerous hours that a lot of people would burn out. All thanks to rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everyone.