Lots of people are unaware that any time you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based on their rate structure it might be as much as 5% of the pot value. That fee is called “the rake.”

But that is not the big secret. The big secret is that you can get a big percentage of that money back!

Online poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over anywhere between $1 million – $3 million a day. Their biggest cost is acquiring new customers. One of the ways they get new customers is to pay webmasters to put ad banners and links on their sites to entice you to play on that particular poker site.

Though the webmasters are not stupid. They know that people they are sending to the poker room might generate hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees or rake and they’ve shrewdly negotiated profit sharing deals with the poker sites. In many cases the webmasters will be earning 35% or even more of the fees/rake you generate playing on the poker site. And not just for a month or perhaps a year but for as long as you’re a customer!

But then the leading players – people who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you will discover people paying $30,000+ per 30 days in rake every month) – started to wonder why these webmasters were making all of this money when the player was the one actually generating the rake.

The greedy webmasters did not want to quit any of their cut and so they threatened the poker rooms to keep quite about the amount of money they were making. Although the smart players already knew. And lots of of them decided to produce a whole new system.

What they said was, “Hey, I will be a webmaster too. And in the event the poker room is paying me 35% I’ll give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service.” Now, if you do the math, the top level guys generating thirty thousand dollars a month in rake all of a sudden were obtaining a windfall $9,900 a month back! That is over and above anything they might have won at the table, bonuses the site may have offered, or any other perks the site might have offered them for being such the best customer.

Now most people are reading this and believe that there’s no way also they can generate $30,000 a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. Actually, anyone can sign up at these sites. Regardless of how big or small a player they may be.

And one doesn’t need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes as a way to make a respectable income from playing poker. For example, Full Article if you play $1/$2 NL poker and may also play four tables at a time (which is extremely doable with some practice) and play 42 hours per week, you could make approximately seventy six thousand dollars a year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you will be getting about seventy six thousand dollars annually back.

That is not a bad living for some people. And if you play higher stakes, more hours, more tables, or actually win money playing poker then your once-a-year take gets even larger.

Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer who shall sack you your second sales drop. You’ve got the freedom to work whenever you want and around you want.

But if you had to do it just on your winnings alone you might never get there. You could have to play either very high stakes or for numerous hours that most people would burn out. All because of rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everyone.

If you would want to learn more about rakeback, check out the links in my signature and obtain started on getting back what you deserve.