Higher buyin tournaments, on the other hand, can have a fairly low rake, with many of the biggest events charging anywhere between 3% and 5% of the overall buyin. Smaller poker tournaments often charge a higher percentage of the buyin fee as poker rake since the costs of throwing a tournament can be quite significant even if the buyin is low. Some live tournaments may end up charging you an extra 3% or so for dealers, while others will expect winners to give a percentage of their prizes as tips for the staff. Poker tournaments charge players for participation by charging every player who enters the tournament a fixed fee at the start.ĭepending on the tournament type, whether you are playing online or offline, buy-in, and other factors, this fee can be between 5% and 20% of your tournament buyin. If you plan on being a professional poker player, or you already are one, you should definitely study rake quite a bit, as it is an essential component of the game.

Poker players are used to paying poker rake, but many don’t know what percentage is being paid, what the rake cap is, or how much they pay each time they play poker. So what is rake in poker exactly? The answer is quite simple poker rake is the fee taken by the house to pay for its expenses and turn a profit at the poker tables.ĭepending on where you play poker, the rake can be quite reasonable or devastating to all the players at the table, which is why it’s very important to know exactly what’s happening. We will start by teaching you what is rake in poker and how it affects you and proceed to teach you what rake methods are applied in live and online poker rooms and what it all actually means. Just knowing rake exists is not enough, though, as there are many different rake structures and rules related to it, which is why we want to cover everything there is to know about rake in poker. In both cases, a small percentage of the money players are playing for is taken out of the overall pot and used to pay the dealers and other staff and allow the casino or poker room to profit. Poker rake is paid in cash games and tournaments, although it is usually called an entry fee in MTTs. While many people think poker is a sucker’s game, like most casino games are, the truth is that the house doesn’t care who wins or loses at the poker tables.Ĭasinos get paid either way through every player involved in the games paying a fee that we call poker rake. One of the biggest misunderstandings about the poker game among people who don’t play it is how casinos make money from it.

Casino poker stakes