Welcome to RakeAtPoker
RakeAtPoker is a website dedicated to online poker and rake. It will allow a poker player to compare the rake structure between PartyPoker (bWin), the iPoker network, PokerStars, Ongame, 888 Poker, Merge Gaming and FullTiltPoker.
What is rake?
Rake is how poker rooms make money.
Poker rooms make profit by charging rake from all real money players.
Rake is the only way for poker rooms to make money, since unlike with other casino games,
in poker the players are wagering money against other players and not against the house.
Think of rake as a small entry fee taken by the poker room for organizing the games.
Poker players do not directly lose any money to the poker room,
but the room is steadily raking in micro payments from every cash game pot and tournament entry.
The proportion of rake taken online is roughly the same 5% of pot size as in brick and mortar casinos, and depending from stakes it can be anywhere from one cent to five dollars.
Why is it hard to compare?
Poker sites are always searching new ways to increase their profits.
Complicated bonuses, rakeback and cashback deals with conditions that are hard to evaluate and compare are becoming more and more common.
This makes it hard to compare the poker rooms in terms of rake, as each poker room has it's own (very complicated) rake structure that depends on the game (Texas Hold'em, Omaha), stake ($1/2, $5/$10), type (No Limit, Fixed Limit, Pot Limit) and potsize.
Hence what we at RakeAtPoker use is an empirical approach to allow a comparison.
We took more than 40 million hands and imported them into a HoldemManager database to extract some statistical information like the percentage of raked hands, average rake per hand, average pot size and some more.
Many thanks to hhDealer.com for giving us such a huge amount of hand histories.
Why do I want to compare the rake
Don't underestimate the rake in todays online poker.
These micro payments from every cash game pot easily sum up to more than 10 big blinds per 100 hands,
hence your winrate needs to be bigger than that before you can make any profit!
In conclusion this means you may beat a specific game/stake but still lose money, since the rake is beating you.
You want players that are worse than you to not lose much money due to the heavy rake impact of a particular site. You want the worse players to be able to afford losing money to you. Therefore you do not want them to lose more than necessary to the poker rooms.
Finally if you vary between two poker sites, or you search for a new poker room to play at, then a rake comparison is very helpful to you.
Other examples:
- Calculate the rake you generated in the past month to estimate your rakeback.
- Compute how much hands you need to play to earn a specific amount of poker room points.
