What Is Rake in Poker?

Rake is the fee the house takes for running the game: a small percentage of each cash-game pot, or a fixed charge added to every tournament buy-in. It comes out whether you finish the session up or down, which is why a table of equally skilled players is a losing table for everyone sitting at it. Beating a poker game means beating the other players by more than the house takes.

How rake is charged

Two structures cover almost every cash game. The common one takes a percentage of the pot with a cap, usually 5% stopping between $3 and $6 depending on the stakes. The other is time collection: a flat fee every half hour, with the pots left alone.

Nearly every room also runs no flop, no drop: if the hand ends before a flop, the pot is not raked. Tournaments differ again — the fee sits outside the prize pool, so a $100 + $10 event returns only about 91% of your money to the players.

Structure	Typical charge	Where it bites
Percentage with cap	5% of the pot up to $4-$5	Small and medium pots
Time collection	A flat fee every half hour	Short sessions, tight play
Tournament fee	8-12% on top of the buy-in	Low buy-ins, high volume

What it costs a single hand

The cap makes rake regressive: the smaller the pot, the larger the share the house keeps.

Open the BTN to $6 with K♠T♠ at $1/$2, get called by the big blind, and take it down with a continuation bet on K♦7♥2♣. The pot is $26 and the house takes $1.30 — a full 5%, nowhere near the cap. Win a $200 pot with the same hand and you pay $5, or 2.5%.

That asymmetry punishes the pots you win most often. Small stabs and folded flops are the bread of a winning session, and handing back 5% of each eats a serious slice of a 5bb/100 win rate.

How to adjust

Rake turns marginal spots into losing ones, so play slightly tighter and favour pots you can win big.

• Defend the big blind less. Blind defence wins a pile of small pots, and small pots carry the highest rake percentage. Solves that include rake fold noticeably more from the BB.
• Cut your thinnest calls. A river call that breaks even without rake is a loser once the house takes its cut of the pot you win.
• Chop the blinds where the game allows it. A blind-versus-blind pot is raked like any other, and contesting it for a few big blinds rarely clears the fee.
• Shop for structure. A $4 cap against a $6 cap is a real difference in your hourly rate, and picking the better table is free.

Rake drags on your results in a less obvious way too. A lower win rate means downswings run longer and deeper before your edge shows, so feed your honest number into a poker variance calculator and compare the swings at 2bb/100 with the same sample at 5bb/100.