Every player knows that the key to profiting at poker is playing well. If you don’t play well, you’re toast long-term. Unfortunately, playing well is not enough. Equally important is understanding how other factors impact your potential profitability. As we have discussed before, there are many ancillary costs of playing poker, and it is important that you make a plan to combat them. Most importantly, however, card rooms don’t survive on good cheer. They take a piece of the action out of every hand. Understanding how your card room takes their piece of the action, the poker rake, is critical in determining how your potential wins, or losses, will be impacted.
Cash Games and Poker Rake
Poker Rake
Let’s imagine for a moment that a 10-handed table has started with each player buying in for $200. Our imaginary casino’s poker rake is $1 for every $10 in the pot, up to $5 total (fairly typical). If the median pot is $30, the average hand loses $3 in every pot. Although there is some variation, on average, there are about 30 hands dealt an hour. We’ll also assume that nobody busted and re-bought or left and was replaced by a new player. The overall rake paid is $90 (30*$3) in that hour; thus, the “average” player will lose $9 in poker rake (or 4.5% of his/her stack) per hour.
