There is a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that individuals do not want you to understand about. Nearly all professional player knows concerning this secret and they’ve found a way to cash in on it. So can you.

Many individuals are unaware that whenever you play trusted online gambling 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’s 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 around $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 know that people they may 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 lots of cases the webmasters are 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 – people that generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, there are actually 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 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. Though the smart players already knew. And many of them decided to generate a whole 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. » Now, 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 some other perks the site might have offered them for being such an excellent customer.

Now lots of people are reading this and feel that there’s no way they may generate $30,000 a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. In fact, anybody can sign up at these sites. However big or small a player they can be.

And one doesn’t need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes in order to make a respectable income from playing poker. By way of example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and also can play four tables at a time (which is extremely doable with some practice) and play 42 hours per week, you can make approximately $76,000 a year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you will be getting about seventy six thousand dollars per year back.

That’s 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 once-a-year take gets even larger.

Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer which will sack you the 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 could never get there. You might have to play either extremely high stakes or for so many hours that the majority of people would burn out. All as a result of rakeback, being a professional poker player is in the reach of nearly everyone.