Friday, November 2, 2007

Rake is a Bitch

Last night Marshall and I compared our October rakeback deposits from Cake, and it really drove home the harsh reality of the rake. My payment was $7.74. The rakeback plan is 33%, which is very nice, but it still means I still had about $15 raked out of my pots this month at a $.02/$.04 game.

My spreadsheet shows I played roughly 1700 hands, which comes out to roughly a penny a hand, and that's with a nice rakeback percentage. Something to think about...until you move up to levels where you are capping the rake on every hand, you can estimate that you are paying half a small blind per hand to play poker online.

Brad, if you signed up for Cake without the rakeback, I wonder if you can retroactively apply it. 33% is pretty huge, I was thrilled to find almost two buyins credited to my acccount for October. I'll email you the info, FWIW.

3 comments:

Marshall said...

I need to count up how many hands I have played. My rakeback was bigger, but you pay rake on hands you lose right lol?

Ryan said...

You mean you *don't* pay rake on hands you lose, I assume.

Yes, it's only on hands you win, but with a big enough sample size, you can run the averages to get an idea of how much on average you will end up paying in rake per hand. Like, Martin has been calculating how much he is winning per hand, even though he is obv. not winning every hand.

I'm up $X in Y hands, so I'm averaging +$X net per hand, and 3.33% of that is raked out.

Just a perspective tool along the lines of calculating that Roger Clemens earns $15,000 a pitch or whatever.

Sushi Cowboy said...

And for those of you wondering, there is no rake on the play money tables which explains why I'm up 200x my original buy.