It is a player versus player game where the house does not wager against its players. The initial fee is used to generate revenues.



The establishment supplies the necessary services for the game to take place. In online poker the initial fee covers the operational costs of support, software and personnel. In traditional brick and mortar casinos additional costs are involved in providing a dealer for the game, support staff (from servers to supervisors), gaming equipments, the building, etc.

In order to win in a poker game, a player must cover the financial drain of the rake along with beating the opponents.

These Casinos and poker rooms might intimidate a novice player due to its incongruent geographical location. Brick and mortar casinos are reluctant to promote as profitability is less as compared to online ones. In spite of high rake or time charges in a traditional casino the higher opportunity costs of running a poker room reduces profitability. Thus they try to make more money by removing poker rooms and adding more slot machines.

On the contrary, online venues are cheaper with less overhead costs. You just need to add another table for an additional player which generally does not take much space like a brick and mortar casino. Players can play here for low stakes as 2'and even get the chance to enter free roll tournaments which attracts new members.

Online venues do welcome certain types of fraud like collusion but the collusion detectors present over there helps the security employees to look at the hand history of the cards. These can be recorded as previously played by any player on the site whereas in the casino, the players fold their hands allowing none to know the strength of their holding. In the online poker rooms, the players' IP addresses are also checked to prevent players playing at the same household or at known open proxy servers from playing on the same tables.

Methods of taking the rake

When you have to pay the rake, the options are also available.

Pot rake - A percentage rake taken directly from the pot where the dealer manually removes chips from the pot while the hand is being played in a casino. It is dropped into a secure box after completion of the hand. In the online games, the rake is automatically set apart by the game software.

Dead drop - Fee placed on the dealer button each hand by the player in that position which is collected before dealing of any card.

Time collection - (”timed rake” or “table charge”) is a set fee collected every half hour during the game. The 2 forms are Player time (an amount is collected from the player) and Time pot (amount collected from the first pot over a certain amount).

Time rakes are prevalent in higher limit games ($10-$20 and above).

Tournament fees

Subscription fees – a monthly subscription fee is (by some online sites) instead of individual pots.

Rake free - the “rake free” poker rooms opts in revenue generation through affiliation or pulling traffic in their other segments.