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- Wpisy
There’s a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that men and women don’t want you to learn about. Almost every professional player knows about this secret and they have found a way to benefit from it. So can you.
A lot of men and women are unaware that any time you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based upon their rate structure it could possibly 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 that you may get a big portion of that money back!
Online poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over anywhere between $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 particular poker site.
Though the webmasters aren’t stupid. They know that individuals they’re 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 will be earning 35% or Gifyu noted maybe more of the fees/rake you generate playing on the poker site. And not only for a month or possibly a year but for as long as you are a customer!
But then the leading players – those that generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you will discover people paying $30,000+ a 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 give up any of their cut and so they threatened the poker rooms to keep quite about the amount of money they were making. Although the smart players already knew. And lots of of them decided to create a whole new system.
What they said was, “Hey, I’ll become 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 the service.” Essentially, in the event that you do the math, the top level guys generating $30,000 a month in rake all of a sudden were acquiring 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 any other perks the site might have offered them for being such the best customer.
Now many people are reading this and assume that there’s no way also they can generate thirty thousand dollars a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. In fact, anyone can sign up at these sites. Regardless how big or small a player they can be.
And one does not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes to be able to make a respectable income from playing poker. As an example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and may play four tables at a time (which is very doable with some practice) and play 42 hours every week, you might make approximately $76,000 each year just on rakeback. Even when you never won a penny at the tables you could be getting about seventy six thousand dollars annually back.
That’s not only a bad living for most people. And if you play higher stakes, more hours, more tables, or actually win money playing poker then your annual take gets even larger.
Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer whom shall sack you the next sales drop. You’ve got the freedom to work whenever you want and just as much as you want.
But if you had to do it just on your winnings alone you might never get there. You would have to play either extremely high stakes or for a lot of hours that a lot of people would burn out. All as a result of rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everybody.
