The Rake

A new concept for players who may be moving from their home games to online poker is the idea of a rake. There are many different ways for a casino, online or real life, to make money off of people who play poker. Because the house is not playing the game, the game has no house advantage but the casino still has to make money.

One way they do this is a rake. A rake is when the house takes a cut of the pot on the hands that are played. Most of the time, the rake is a percentage of the total size of the pot and it is often capped by a certain value limit. For example, a rake could be 5 percent of each pot over 100 dollars and it caps at 50 dollars. Meaning that on hands that have more than two thousand dollars in the pot, the casino will still only take 50 dollars. Another way that they can take money off the table are time fees where they collect a certain amount of money from players every hour that they are sitting at the table.

When you are playing online, it is good to find a website that has a low rake. With that said, a low rake is important but you need to balance that rake with how good the players are. The less money that they take out of the pot, the more money that stays on the table and, hopefully, ends up in your stack at the end of the play session.