Cash Games,
Land Based Poker
August 5 2008
Many players who play most of their poker online can run into problems with the rake the first time they sit down in a cash game at a casino. There is generally a big difference between the rake online and the rake in your local casino. The next time you’re in a casino poker room, look around at the employees. There’s likely a poker room manager, a chip runner, dealers and servers. The casino has to pay for all these people, while none of them exist when you’re playing online.
Here’s an example of a few rakes you might find online. At a cheap $0.50/$1.00 table, the rake is $0.50 per $1 in the pot with a maximum rake of $1. At a much more expensive table with $50/$100 limits, the rake is $1 when the pot reaches $100 and $0.50 per $50 thereafter with a max of $5. You won’t find $0.50/$1 tables at a casino because they’re not affordable, and you won’t find cheap rakes like this either.
Most casino rakes are a percentage of the pot, usually somewhere between 5–10 percent. One example for a well-known Vegas casino is a rake of 10 percent with a max rake of $5 per hand at low limits.
However, there are also incremental rakes. Under these rules the rake is taken in increments, like in the following example. There are two tables with the same 10 percent increments with a maximum $4.00 rake. One table takes the rake in $1 increments, and the other takes it in $0.25 increments. At the $1 table, a dollar is taken out for every $10 in the pot. At $10, one dollar is taken, while at $20 another is taken, and so on up to $4. At the $0.25 table, the house takes a quarter when the pot reaches $2.50. Another quarter at $5, $7.50 and so on.
Whenever you play in a casino for the first time, always find out how the rake is taken to determine how much you actually have to win to beat the rake.
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