Rake is how online poker rooms make their money. Instead of you playing against the house at a statistical disadvantage or having the odds manipulated by bookies in order to ensure that they never lose money over the long term, rake is essentially taking money out of the pot rather than the person. This means that the winner of the pot essentially has some of their money taken from them in order to cover the costs of running the poker room.

However, this does not mean that the winner alone pays the rake. Rake is calculated based on contributions to the pot and because of that you are paying rake whenever you put something into the pot. The rake is taken in real time as the hand is played, meaning that the money was still yours at the time the rake was taken. Because of this, it is possible to take a look at the rake schedule of a particular online website and combine that information with information about your bets in order to calculate the amount of rake you contribute over the course of your entire session and indeed many online poker software packages such as Poker Tracker do have this functionality built in for you to utilize. To most people, the answers are shocking.

There are a number of things that influence the amount of rake that gets collected from a pot. Most significantly, the limit that you are playing at influences the rake greatly. Playing at smaller limits will generate smaller rake amounts and rake maximums, but the percentage of rake taken might be higher. Similarly, playing at higher limits will generate higher rake amounts and maximums, but you will be paying a lower percentage of the overall pot in the long term. This is why even though you pay more absolute rake amounts at higher limits, you end up saving money in the long term because you are giving up a smaller percentage to do so.

Other factors that influence the amount of rake taken from a pot include the betting structure utilized and the number of players that are dealt cards in the hand. Betting structures of limit usually have a more complicated rake schedule because of their more rigid form, whilst their pot limit and no limit counterparts usually have very simple rake schedules for the opposite reason. In regards to number of players, the more players that see cards in a hand, the higher the amount of maximum rake taken from that hand will be.

Hopefully, the above discourse has allowed you to see the basics of how rakes are supposed to work. This in turn should lead you to an understanding of why a significant amount of money is taken from you as a rake. Once you know about that information, understanding how important rake promotions from different websites can be should be a lot easier to do.

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