| As soon as a rookie moves on from play money tables to real money play, he’ll notice the game gets a lot tougher for more reasons than one. Not only is it a whole different ballgame, because the real money is real motivation, but also because of the rake. The rake is a percentage of every pot collected by the house. The industry standard is 5% up to a max of $3. Apparently, it is the winner who pays the rake, since he’s the one to receive a $97 pot instead of a $100 one, but that’d be just too simple, wouldn’t it?
If you consider the only influence the rake has on the way you play, is the money you do not win when you take the pot, you’re wrong.
The rake is with you every single hand you play and it will make your life miserable. I know you’ll say the money that you stuff into the pot is gone anyway, once someone wins it, and I admit that is true. You probably consider that the sequence of events leading up to the rake being taken is the following: you stuff the pot together with the other players. Some lucky rookie outdraws you on the river and the pot is his. The house then comes around and chips $3 off the top of it, leaving the winner with the remaining money.
Well, that’s not quite how it happens. It’s more like this: the hand concludes, and there is a winner. The pot is still a separate entity, belonging a little bit to each of the players who posted money during play. The house takes the rake off it, and gives the remainder to the winner. The rake is money the winner has never won, so there’s no way the house can take it away from him.
Every time you actively participate in a poker hand, you pay rake. Doesn’t look all that simple now, does it?
The simplest way to illustrate how a losing player contributes rake is the following: take three extremely tight players (kind of like a Vegas poker game) and let them play short handed. Repeat the experiment a few times, so that the amount of rake you collect at the end of each session becomes a relevant estimate for what these three guys are capable of producing, in general. Take one of the tight players out and put a hyper-aggressive rookie in his place. Let’s suppose this guy is a really lousy poker player and he doesn’t win a single hand, but generates a lot of action while his bankroll lasts. Check the rake they generate now. A lot more than before, right? And it’s all due to the player who lost every hand he played.
Poker rooms keep track of the rake each and every player generates. This is their way of knowing the “value” of their players. The more rake someone generates, the more valuable that player is for the room he/she plays at.
Rake is tracked for more practical reasons, too. Whenever you sign up for a rakeback deal, the amount of rakeback you get is directly proportional with your MGR (rake generated by you). The more rake you generate, the more rakeback you receive.
In this respect, if you’re a good player playing with rakeback, you should know the method your poker room uses to calculate your MGR. Some poker rooms simply take the total amount of rake generated during the course of a hand and divide it to the number of players around the table. This setup will suit you fine if you’re tight-passive player. Other poker rooms only take those players into account who actively participate in the hand. There are poker rooms which calculate an exact MGR percentage every hand you play depending on how much money you posted. If you’re a good player, this is the setup that gives you full credit.
The poker rake has the power to change the very nature of the game you’re playing: the type of rake-collection that I just described above, leads to extremely tight and difficult-to-beat games. Time-collection (you pay rake in certain time intervals) makes games a lot more open and aggressive.
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