An In-depth Overview Of Poker

Poker is a card game that almost all casinos offer. But other than casino monsters like Blackjack, slots or Roulette, casinos have no vested interests in the Poker. This means that all casinos have a house edge. A house edge is an internal revenue that a casino develops through the games like Blackjack, Roulette or slots. This house edge is the way in which the casino makes money through the games they offer. If one takes the Roulette for example, for every $\€\£ 1000 bet, the casino takes some $\€\£ 30. This amount varies from game to game.

Poker also offers one more anomaly from the rest of the casino games. In games like Blackjack, slot or Roulette, the player plays against the casino. But in Poker, a player actually plays against another player around his table. This clearly says that the casinos cannot exercise house edge in Poker. The role of the casino is to keep track of cards and the game.

Now the big question here is, how do casinos earn money from Poker? The answer to this question is just a word – RAKE.

Rake is a percentage of money, something like a tax that the casino keeps for every cash game pot or tournament entry fee. Rake is actually something that should be discussed in a deeper and wider perspective. So let us go into the deeper sections of rake and casinos.

The rake on an hourly basis

Many casinos take the rake from Poker in a centralised and collective manner. But there are some casinos who are interested in taking the rake hourly. Here no money is taken from your pot. Whereas the money is taken from you for each passing hour, you spend there. Moreover, this is a fixed amount of money that you spend for an hour or so.

Anomalies on stakes

Whether you are offering a high stake or a low stake, the rake that they take from you is different. If you are playing on a small stake games, the rake will be somewhere around 5% and a high CAP. But if you are on a large stake game, then the amount of rake that they take from you will be somewhere around 3%. Along with that, the CAP that they charge for larger stake games is less compared to those charged for low stakes. So this clearly mentions the disadvantage of small stake players. However, we can’t blame the casinos for this. Because they have to invest in tables, card maintenance, dealer quality, infrastructure etc. this means that their expense to host Poker is high. So they definitely have to cope up with that. And they do it through the rake.

Rake in a new bottle

The tournaments are a new format of Poker playing that uses chips. These chips basically have no monetary value. So casinos can’t take rake directly. For this, what they do is that they will take an extra $\€\£ 10 or $\€\£ 20 in the form of buy-in. This is always taken from the player at the start and they won’t touch the result of the tournament. We can obviously say that buy-in is another form of rake. This is mainly the money that the casino takes for meeting their expenses for hosting the tournament. Whatever it is, they often give profit to the casino.

Poker in the online wagon

When it comes to online games, they don’t have to pay for tables, maintaining cards, dealers and all. Because they are all built up in a virtual environment. Their main expense is of hiring a skilled programmer to programme and run the game and a well-equipped server and domain. This clearly states that the working expenses of online casinos are less. And this is the prime reason why they offer a great variety of offers. So in the light of less expense, the small rake that they take from their players, offer a high increase in their profit. What they require is only efficient traffic into their domain.

Now you know how these casinos conquer money from Poker. And I can say, all of you should have found out the reason for those high prize pools that these particular casinos offer for tournaments.

As a player, there is not much importance for you to know about the way in which casino earn money from Poker. But once you know that, you can check on for casinos offering lower rake. Since the rake is low, your cash out will stay close to the real amount.