Guide
What the rake actually does to your marginal hands
Everybody knows the rake is there and almost nobody prices it. It is not a flat tax on your winnings: it is a tax on the number of pots you drag, which means it falls almost entirely on the hands you were closest to folding anyway.
No flop, no drop, and then a cap
Take a common structure in a $2/$5 game: 10% of the pot, capped at $8, plus $1 for the jackpot, and nothing taken at all if the hand ends before a flop. The percentage sounds like the whole story and it is not, because the cap stops the big pots being taxed while the drop keeps coming out of the small ones.
| Pot | Taken out | Effective rake |
|---|---|---|
| $60 | $7 | 11.7% |
| $100 | $9 | 9% |
| $150 | $9 | 6% |
| $200 | $9 | 4.5% |
| $400 | $9 | 2.3% |
| $800 | $9 | 1.1% |
A pot of $60 pays 11.7% and a pot of $800 pays 1.1%. Winning the small one is worth 88.3% of what the chips in the middle say; winning the big one is worth 98.9%. Every marginal hand you play is a bet on the expensive end of that table.
What it costs an hour
Say 30 hands an hour, 60% of them seeing a flop, and you winning your share of those at an 8-handed table. That is 2.3 raked pots an hour with your name on them. At $200 a pot, the house has taken $20 out of your stack every hour you sat there, or $2,000 over a hundred hours.
Those assumptions are deliberately flat, and the real figure moves with your room, your seat and how much you play. The point is the order of magnitude. For a lot of live players that number is bigger than the win rate they are chasing, and it comes out of the same pots the win rate is made in.
Where it bites, and where it does not
It barely touches a big decision. Facing $100 into $150 on the river, you need 28.6% to call without the rake and 29.3% with it, because the cap was reached long ago and the house is taking the same $9 whatever you do. A call that was correct stays correct.
It devastates the small one. The hands that make their money in pots of a hundred dollars or less are the ones whose edge is a few percent of the pot, and a few percent of the pot is precisely what has been removed. The offsuit broadway you open from early position, the second limp behind with a weak ace, the call that was break-even before the drop: all of them are now losers, and none of them feels any different while you are playing it.
What to do about it
Not play tighter, exactly. Play the hands that win big pots and fold the hands that win small ones. Suited and connected cards beat offsuit broadways by more in a raked live game than any chart written for an online table will tell you, because their money arrives in pots the cap has already stopped taxing.
And stop treating the small pot as free. A pot that is checked down and dragged with the best ace is worth noticeably less than it looks, which is an argument for betting it and an argument against calling to win it.
Questions people ask
Is a time charge better than a drop?
For a winning player, usually. A time collection is a fixed cost for sitting there and it does not touch the pot, so no individual decision is priced against it. It makes the marginal hands playable again and charges you for the hours instead.
Does the jackpot drop come back to me?
Almost never, and it is taken out of every raked pot whatever the size, which makes it the most expensive part of the structure for a small pot. Treat it as rake until the day it pays you.
Should I bloat pots to get past the cap?
No. The cap is a reason to prefer hands that make big pots naturally, not a reason to put money in with hands that do not want to be there.
Read next
- How a straddle changes your opening sizesA $10 straddle is the live big blind. Open four of those first in, and two and a half more for every limper, with the real numbers for a $2/$5 game.
- Why solver output does not fit the game in front of youA solve answers a question about two players, no straddle and a hundred big blinds. Here is what changes when three live players see a flop.
- What actually beats you when the board pairsTrip eights on the board are everybody's trips. The exact count of the hands that beat you, worked out against every combination left in the deck.
Driller can take your room's rake out of the pot while you drill, so the price you are offered in a hand is the price you are offered at the table rather than a clean one that flatters every marginal call you make.