Rakeback 101 · Part 1
What Is Rake in Poker?
The house doesn't play against you. It charges you for the seat — one small slice at a time.
In a casino game like blackjack the house wins by having an edge in the game itself. Poker is played between the players, so the room makes its money differently: it takes a small percentage out of each cash-game pot, and adds a fee to each tournament entry. That charge is the rake. It's legal, universal and openly published — every serious room lists its rake structure — but almost nobody reads it, and it quietly decides how much of your winnings you keep.
Cash games: a percentage of the pot, up to a cap
When a cash-game hand ends, the room removes a percentage of the pot before pushing it to the winner — usually around 5%, and never more than a fixed cap for that stake and table size. A $40 pot at 5% costs $2. A $400 pot at the same table doesn't cost $20, because the cap kicks in: on most rooms, somewhere between $1 and $4 depending on the stakes and how many players were dealt in. The cap is why rake feels heaviest at small stakes, where pots rarely reach it, and why serious players compare caps rather than percentages — see the rake comparison for every room side by side.
Worked example: one hour at NL25
You play 6-max at $0.10/$0.25, roughly 80 hands an hour. You win, say, 8 pots averaging $12 each. At 5% the room took $0.60 from each of them — about $4.80 an hour out of pots you won, plus a share of the pots you lost under some rake models (below). Play 15 hours a week and that's around $70 of rake a week, $300 a month. Notice this is completely independent of whether you're winning or losing overall. It's the cost of the seat.
Tournaments: a fee on the buy-in
Tournament rake is simpler and shown up front. A "$10 + $1" tournament puts $10 in the prize pool and $1 in the room's pocket — a 10% fee, though it's 9.1% of what you actually paid. Fees run about 7.5–10% on small buy-ins and drop to 5% or less on big ones. Sit & Go's and Spin & Go's work the same way; WPN, for instance, charges a flat 6% on Spins. Because tournament rake is a fixed share of every entry, a break-even tournament player is losing exactly the fee — which is why rakeback matters even more to tournament grinders than to cash players.
The details that change what you pay
Dealt vs. weighted-contributed rake
Rooms need a rule for who "paid" the rake on a pot, because that's what loyalty programs and rakeback are calculated from. Under the dealt method, everyone dealt into the hand is credited an equal share, even the players who folded preflop. Under weighted contributed (PokerStars' method) you're credited in proportion to the money you put in the pot. If you play a tight, patient style, weighted contributed attributes less rake to you and pays you less rakeback; a loose style does the opposite.
"No flop, no drop"
Many rooms — GG Network, WPN, SwC and most club apps — take no rake on hands that end before the flop. Someone raises, everyone folds, the pot moves with nothing removed. In aggressive games where a lot of hands end preflop this is a real discount that the headline percentage doesn't show.
Why table size matters
Caps rise with the number of players dealt in: a room might cap at $0.50 heads-up, $1.50 at four players and $3 at a full table of the same stake. More players build bigger pots, so the room takes more. Heads-up and short-handed specialists care about the 2p/3p columns; full-ring players care about the top cap.
Where to see it in the client
Every licensed room publishes its rake table — usually under "Rake" or "Fees" in the help section — and the hand history of each pot shows exactly how much was taken. Tracking software also totals it, which is often the moment players realise how large the number is over a month.
So what do you do about it?
You can't avoid rake, but you can pay less of it in two ways: choose rooms with lower caps for the games you play, and get part of it back. The second is rakeback — the room, or an affiliate, returning a percentage of the rake attributed to you. That's the next part: how rakeback works. Or start from the top at Rakeback 101.