You Pay to Play

There's one primary reason running an online poker room is good business. Really good business. And that's "rake".

Rake is the percentage of each pot at each table taken by the poker room as a fee for playing. And we're not talking petty cash here. The rake is for an example the sole reason the founders of one of the first online poker rooms, Party Poker, was for a long time comfortably ranked in the Top 200 of the wealthiest Americans.

The reason rake is so profitable is the incredible number of hands played online. Compared to live poker you can play an insane number of hands in no time when online – mainly because when the software takes care of all the tedious stuff like shuffling and dealing, the whole thing just moves a lot faster. Also the shortened period of time each player is given to make a decision – typically somewhere between 20 and 30 seconds – speeds up the game big time.

Just looking at the percentages, the rake may seem small and indifferent. It varies from poker room to poker room, but generally a 5% rake is taken from each cash game pot played up to a certain maximum, and when it comes to SnG tournaments or Multitable tournaments the rake (or fee) is typically close to 10% on top of the buy-in.
These are not obscene percentages, but when you take into consideration how many cash game hands and tournaments, you as a player are involved in online, the combined rake you pay is staggering. In fact the rake you pay is often the difference between a winning and a losing poker player.

When forced to pay the rake, you basically need to turn a small profit all the time to just break even. With 5% of each pot raked by the poker room you literally speaking need to constantly win 5% in order to not lose money.
When you lose a pot, you really don't care about the rake, because it's the player winning the pot, who will see 5% disappear into the poker room's wallet. But when you win the pot, you'll notice.

Minimizing the rake is obviously a good idea, and it can actually be done. The idea is, that since rake is taken from every pot won, you need to win as many of the pots you are involved in as possible.

This sounds really obvious, but in reality it isn't. It fundamentally requires you to exercise a strong discipline in choosing your starting hands, since playing more (and more mediocre) starting hands will get you involved in a lot of pots you won't win.
Luckily a highly disciplined choice of starting hands is not only a good strategy to avoid paying too much rake. It also happens to be the single best overall strategy at the poker table – especially if you are a beginner.


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