The Rake Effect, Venetian Off to Slow Start, World’s Largest Strip Poker Game Planned

I had a short, sweet, note from a reader, who asked: “How does the rake affect me and can it turn a winning player into a loser?”

I answered succinctly, and told the reader to think of the rake as a cost of doing business. Without the rake, poker would be a purely “zero-sum” game, in which a dollar lost by one player is a dollar one by another.

But the rake, or time charge – depending on the system in use, takes money off the table from all players. In a $10-$20 brick and mortar poker game with a five-dollar per half-hour time charge, each player pays ten dollars per hour to play, or the equivalent of one-half of a big bet.

The best players figure to earn approximately 1.5 BB per hour in the long run, so you have to overcome a rather significant cost to make poker profitable for you. I’ve read estimates that only about ten to fifteen percent of all players are long-term winners at poker, and the difference between the fifty percent you’d expect to see if the game were truly “zero-sum” and the ten to fifteen percent it actually is, can be attributed to the cost of doing business: the rake.

After I responded to the reader’s question, I did some nosing around and found a terrific post about rakes in A Slave to Variance

This is Andrew Prock’s blog and a great resource about questions like these.