There is a dirty little secret going on within the online poker world that men and women do not want you to know about. Nearly all professional player knows concerning this secret and they’ve found a way to profit from it. So can you.
Many people 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 very well be 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 the fact that you may get a large number 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. 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.
However the webmasters aren’t stupid. They know that the individuals 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 are earning 35% or 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’re a customer!
But then the leading players – folks who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you will discover 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 quit 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 many of them decided to produce a new system.
What they said was, « Hey, I’ll be a webmaster too. And should the poker room is paying me 35% I’ll give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing simply click the next internet site service. » Essentially, if you do the math, the top level guys generating thirty thousand dollars a month in rake all of a sudden were getting 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 an excellent customer.
Now the majority of people are reading this and assume 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. However big or small a player they’re.
And one does not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes in order to make a respectable income from playing poker. For instance, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and can also play four tables at a time (which is very doable with some practice) and play 42 hours per week, you might make approximately $76,000 annually just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you would be getting about $76,000 a year back.
That’s 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 total annual take gets even larger.
Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer whom shall sack you your second sales drop. You have the freedom to work when 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 quite high stakes or for a lot of hours that a lot of people would burn out. All due to rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everyone.