Rake in Poker
Rake is the fee a poker room keeps for running a real-money game, taken as a percentage of each cash-game pot up to a fixed cap, or charged as a separate fee on a tournament buy-in. It is how the room earns from poker, since players compete against each other rather than against the house. The percentage, the cap and the rules on which pots are raked are set by each operator, so two tables at the same stake can cost quite different amounts over a session.
How Rake Is Calculated in Cash Games
The most common model is pot rake: the room takes a set percentage of the pot, and stops once that amount reaches the cap. In practice the deduction is whichever is lower, the percentage of the pot or the cap, and it comes out of the pot once before the winner is paid, never once per player.
The figures are not standard across the industry. Published guides put online rates at roughly 3–5% of the pot and live cardrooms at around 5–10%, with caps that change by stake and sometimes by the number of players seated. PokerStars, for example, lists 3.5% capped at $0.30 at its $0.01/$0.02 tables, and 5% at $3/$6, where the cap is $1.50 with two to four players and $3.50 with five or more.
The cap is the part readers most often overlook.
No flop, no drop
Many Texas Hold’em rooms follow a convention called no flop, no drop: if a hand is won before the flop is dealt, nothing is raked. Whether a room applies it, and whether it sets a minimum pot below which no rake is taken, is written in that room’s own rake schedule rather than in any common rulebook.
Worked Example: One Rate, Six Pot Sizes
The table uses a hypothetical structure of 5% with a €3 cap, a common shape in published examples but not any particular room’s schedule. It shows how the cap, reached at a €60 pot, pulls the effective rate down as pots grow.
| Pot size | 5% of pot | Rake taken | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| €10 | €0.50 | €0.50 | 5% |
| €40 | €2.00 | €2.00 | 5% |
| €60 | €3.00 | €3.00 | 5% |
| €100 | €5.00 | €3.00 | 3% |
| €200 | €10.00 | €3.00 | 1.5% |
| €500 | €25.00 | €3.00 | 0.6% |
Tournament Fees and Rakeback
Tournaments are raked differently. The entry is usually written as two figures, such as €100+€9, where the first goes into the prize pool and the second is the room’s fee, commonly somewhere between 5% and 10% of the buy-in. Because that fee is fixed up front, it cannot be compared directly with a cash-game percentage.
Rakeback is the share of rake a room returns to a player through a loyalty or VIP scheme, and the headline percentage tells you less than it seems. What decides the payout is how the room attributes rake to each player. Under the dealt method, everyone dealt into a raked hand gets an equal share of credit, even if they folded at once; under contributed methods, only players who put money in are credited, and the weighted version splits it in proportion to what each one paid in.
Two rooms advertising the same rakeback can therefore pay very different sums to the same player.
Rake Versus House Edge
Rake is often confused with house edge, and the difference matters. House edge is the built-in mathematical advantage the casino holds in games like roulette or blackjack, where the player bets against the house and the rules themselves set the long-run return. In poker the house holds no stake in who wins the hand; it simply charges for the seat, the dealing and the software.
That has a consequence players sometimes miss. A skilled player can win money from weaker opponents over a large sample, but the rake is paid regardless of who wins, so the edge over the table has to exceed the rake before any profit appears. One winning session proves nothing either way, for the same reason a single night at roulette says nothing about its RTP.
What we check first on any poker page is the full rake schedule, by stake and table size, rather than the headline percentage.
