Rake

Rake is how a poker room gets paid. Unlike a casino table game, the house has no stake in the outcome of a poker hand — it takes a service fee for dealing the cards, and that fee is the single largest recurring cost a regular player faces.

How rake works in a cash game

The standard model is a percentage with a cap. The dealer takes a set share of each pot, commonly in the region of five per cent, but never more than a fixed ceiling. The cap is the part that matters most: once a pot is large enough to hit it, every additional chip wagered is raked at zero. This is why rake weighs far more heavily on small pots than large ones, and why it hurts low-stakes players disproportionately — at micro stakes the cap is often reached in pots of only a few big blinds.

Most rooms also apply "no flop, no drop": if the hand ends before the flop, usually because everyone folded to a pre-flop raise, no rake is taken at all.

Time collection instead

Higher-stakes live games frequently switch from pot rake to a time charge. Every player at the table pays a fixed amount every half hour regardless of how many pots are played or how big they get. For a loose, high-volume game this is usually cheaper than percentage rake; for a tight, slow one it is not.

Tournament fees are a separate thing

In a tournament the fee is bolted onto the advertised buy-in rather than taken from pots. An entry listed as $100 + $10 means $100 goes to the prize pool and $10 to the house. The fee is charged once, on entry, which makes tournament cost structure far easier to reason about than cash-game rake — and it is why re-entry events multiply the fee as well as the prize pool.

Why rake decides whether a game is beatable

Rake is deducted from the pot before anyone wins it, so it comes straight out of the money moving between players. A game can be rich in weak opposition and still unprofitable if the rake is high enough to swallow the edge. Comparing rake structures across rooms at the same stake is one of the few edges available to a player that requires no skill at the table at all.

Rakeback and rewards

Rakeback returns a share of the rake a player has generated, either as a direct percentage or through a tiered loyalty scheme that pays out in cash, tournament tickets or bonuses. It does not change the game's underlying economics, but for a high-volume player it can be the difference between a small win rate and a flat one. Read the terms: schemes differ in whether they count raked pots, contributed rake, or dealt rake, and the three produce very different returns for the same play.