What Is Rake in Online Poker (and How It Affects Your Win Rate)

Rake, in one sentence

Rake is the fee a poker room takes out of the game for hosting it — the house's cut, taken either from cash pots or as a tournament entry fee on top of the prize pool. It's not unique to any one site; every real-money poker room charges it in some form. What varies a lot is how it's structured, and how much it actually costs you over time.

How cash game rake is usually structured

Most online cash games use percentage rake, taken out of the pot at showdown (or when the pot is won), up to a cap — a maximum rake amount regardless of pot size. A common shape is something like 5% up to a cap that scales with stakes and table size. Some rooms instead use time-based rake, charging players a flat fee per half-hour seated rather than a cut of each pot — less common online than live, but it exists.

Tournament rake (the fee)

In tournaments, rake shows up as the "fee" portion of a buy-in — a $10+1 tournament has a $1 fee on top of the $10 that goes to the prize pool. It's usually a fixed percentage of the buy-in, commonly somewhere around 10%, though this varies by site and tournament size.

Why rake matters more than a few cents a hand suggests

Rake is small on any single hand, but it compounds relentlessly across thousands of hands a serious player sees. At low stakes especially, rake can be a significant fraction of the edge a skilled player has over the field — which is exactly why "rake-adjusted win rate" is a more honest number than raw win rate when comparing your results across different games, stakes, or sites with different rake structures.

Rake isn't always just "rake"

Some rooms add extra fee line items beyond the standard rake — CoinPoker's Splash Fee is one example, a separate charge on top of rake that shows up on certain cash tables. That extra fee is a common cause of "Invalid Pot Size" import errors in tracking software that isn't expecting it.

Getting some of it back

Rake isn't necessarily a fixed cost you just absorb — many rooms return a portion of it to players through rakeback or a VIP/rewards program. See what rakeback is and how it affects your bankroll for how that works and why it matters more the more volume you play.

Rake structure is a real factor in picking a room

Because rake compounds so heavily over volume, it's worth weighing alongside traffic, software and rakeback when you're deciding where to actually play — see how to choose an online poker room for the full checklist.