What is "Rake" ?

Im a beginner with some knowledge of poker but i just cant understand what rake is? can someone fully explain this to me?

Thanks.

Rake is the "cut" of the buy-in fee (fot tournament play or SNG) or a % of the pot that the site/cardroom/casino takes from each hand played in cash games.

If you buy into a $11 tournament, usually $10 goes to the prize pool and $1 goes to the "house" as rake.

It's how casinos and sites make their money.

Yes, i understood that part but i dont understand what players mean when they say when rake will be "a pain in the ass" when multi tabling etc as if it took your profit away?

RSdavid46 said:

Yes, i understood that part but i dont understand what players mean when they say when rake will be "a pain in the ass" when multi tabling etc as if it took your profit away?

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It might be easier just to show you...

In this example, I have made $33 profit on top of the $86 I paid in rake during that time.

Had there been no rake I would be up over $115.

The higher % of rake you pay, the more of a profitable player you have to be. The funny thing is you have to be a marginally winning player just to hold even against the rake.

As you play more tables at once, rake is being taken at a higher rate. One must be able to keep up with the action and still play well over more tables otherwise the rake will eat any marginal extra profit you will make by playing the extra tables.

Lets say i play a 1000 HU games that have an entry fee of $3.40 + $0.10 and I have a win rate of 52%. I win ($6800x0.52)-$3500 = $36. If rake didn't exist I'd only play I'd have won ($7000x0.52)-$3500 = $140. I'm losing $104/1000 games due to rake. If I start 4-tabling I lose 4x as much.

Rake is a pain in the ass as it's costing me a a lot of money. If I had 100% rb I'd get about $300 refund and I've not even put in serious volume this year.

Another crazy thing is "rakeback pros" where people can actually make money, not from playing poker well, but from the amount of hands they play. I have to imagine this must be a boring compared to actually playing, but definitely shows how important understanding rakeback is as well as its impact on online play.

Rack back pros could prob murder players if they were to drop to lets say 6 tables.

JOEBOB69 said:

Rack back pros could prob murder players if they were to drop to lets say 6 tables.

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Didn't mean to imply that rakeback pros were not talented. I'm sure a lot of them are good players especially since they have to spend hours upon hours playing, it just seemed from what I've been reading about how this system works the emphasis is on the amount of hands you play.

The above are all great reasons as to why you should never play at a site if you can not get Rakeback. I did it with FTP and PS for the longest time. I now play at Carbon with RB and will play there even if other sites start accepting US players again unless the other sites offer me the same RB and have better Omaha games