Anybody who plays poker seriously has probably thought about becoming a professional poker player. We see people like Phil Ivey or whoever your favorite player is and we think how great it would be to just sit around and play poker every day.
But the truth is most people aren’t good enough to play the game as their main source of income. In fact, the cold hard truth is that just based on win/loss stats, well over 90% of players are either break-even or net losers.
But what if someone could show you how to make a living playing online poker even if you are a break-even or small losing player? And we’re not talking about minimum wage, just-getting-by sort of making a living but actually enough to have a nice place, decent car, and live better than the vast majority of people?
It sounds impossible but only because it involves a secret most people don’t want you to know about. All the top pros and almost anybody actually making a living playing poker knows this secret but the poker rooms and the poker media want to keep it a secret.
If you’ll follow along a bit with me I’ll expose the entire secret. And I’ll also tell you why everyone wants to keep it a secret. It’s sort of like if someone discovered a way to run a car on water in the sense that there is a lot of money to be lost by big companies if everyone finds out about this secret.
If you’ve ever played in a live poker room before you’ll notice that the dealer takes a small amount of money out of each pot. Maybe a $1 here or $2 there. That’s how the card room makes money. That money is called, the rake. That’s how they pay for the dealers, the floor staff, and cashiers, and everyone else who makes a card room run.
Online they take the same amount. Technically that money goes to pay for customer support, software engineers to build the game, and such. But online poker is a great business because the costs aren’t as linear as a live poker room. If I have two poker tables going in a live casino I have to have two dealers and each dealer is paid a salary. But if I have two online poker tables going the incremental cost is next to nothing. There are no live dealers to pay a salary to. All that it costs the online poker room is extra bandwidth (which they buy in bulk anyway) and some computing resources (which they own in bulk anyway).
So where does all that extra money go? Well a big part gets paid to affiliates. An affiliate is some other website that agrees to promote the poker room in exchange for a percentage of the rake the players they refer generate. And in the online poker industry they don’t just get paid for the first month or the second month or the tenth month but for as long as you keep playing and generating rake.
And the percentage isn’t small. The typical online poker site will pay anywhere from 30% – 50% of the rake you pay back to the affiliate. The most common deals are about 35% so we’ll use that as an example throughout the rest of this paper but some rooms are hungary enough to pay 50% or even more to have these other sites send them new players.
Many players who make a living playing online poker generate $5000 – $10,000 a month in rake. And that’s not just guys playing the biggest limits. Many of the players who play smaller limits generate large amounts of rake because as a percentage of the money wagered the rake is higher at the lower limits and lower limit players tend to play 4, 8, 20 games at a time. So, that means some affiliate is earning $1,800 – $3,500 a month off a single player every month. Forever! If the affiliate can send 100 players like that to the poker room he’s earning $2 million – $ 4 million a year.
So who are these affiliates? Well, do you visit any message boards, poker news sites, or blogs? Those are all probably affiliates. Notice how they always have links to the online poker rooms? If you click on that link and then sign up they’re getting a cut of all your rake.
It should come as no surprise that these sites don’t want you to know how profitable their business is. If people found out that by clicking on a link to an online poker site that they would be paying someone thousands of dollars a year in commissions they might . . . ask for a cut of the action.
That’s what rakeback is. Certain affiliates started listening to their customers and began offering them back a cut of the money they were getting. Immediately, the other affiliates in the industry shunned those who began offering rakeback. Go do a search on any of the major poker news websites for the word rakeback. You won’t find much if anything at all. The CEO of one of these rakeback affiliates could set himself on fire during the middle of the WSOP and many poker news sites wouldn’t cover it because they don’t want to talk about rakeback. Because if the word gets out then their customers might start asking for it.
The affiliates even put pressure on the online poker sites to keep their quiet about it. If you’re running a poker room and getting hundreds of signups a day from these affiliates and they say they’ll cut you off tomorrow if you admit rakeback exists it’s best to keep your mouth shut.
The way rakeback works is someone signs up as a regular affiliate on a poker site. Let’s say they get a deal where they get 35% of the revenue generated by their referrals. But what the rakeback affiliate does is tells his customers that he’ll give them back 32% or 33% and only keep the difference (2% – 3%) as his administration fee.
Are you starting to see why everyone wants to keep this a secret? An affiliate making $4 million a year that suddenly was forced to offer rakeback would have their earnings sliced to $240,000.
And that is the secret on how a winning, break-even, or even slightly losing player can make a living playing online poker. Rakeback!
Let’s say that you’re a $1/$2 6-max NL player. You play 4 tables, 8 hours a day. If you had a 32% rakeback deal you could make roughly $98,000 a year without earning a single penny at the tables. Completely break-even you’re up $98,000!!!
The way most players maximize rakeback is not by moving up in limits buy by playing more tables so let’s say you got good enough to play break-even poker on 8 tables. That’s $197,000 a year in your pocket and you didn’t make a single penny on your poker play.
Keep in mind these are estimates based on how many hands are player per hour, the average rake per room, etc but even if they’re off by a little bit it should be obvious that if you’re trying to make a living playing poker and you aren’t getting rakeback you’re dead in the water.
Even if you aren’t ready to quit your job and make your living playing online poker getting rakeback will put a little extra cash in your pocket every month. Maybe enough to take that vacation you’ve always wanted or maybe you can afford to buy a nicer car or whatever you want to do. It’s your money. Don’t give it to the affiliates who keep it all and give nothing back.
Rakeback Report is one of the leading poker rakeback sites. The site is run by someone who has worked at several of the largest online poker rooms and knows the industry inside and out. Plus Rakeback Report has partnered with other rakeback affiliates so they can offer you their combined leverage and sponsor rake races (highest raking players win bonus money) and other promotions that aren’t offered anywhere else.
If you want to make a living playing online poker, do yourself a favor and sign up at Rakeback Report and start getting the money you deserve.