Rake in poker: how it’s taken, what sites charge and what it costs you

Rake in poker is the fee the house charges for running the game. In cash games it is a small percentage taken from each pot, usually 5% online, up to a fixed maximum called the cap. In tournaments it is a fee added to the buy-in: a $10 tournament listed as $10 + $1 costs $11, and the $1 goes to the site. At a $0.05/$0.10 online table, a $8 pot pays $0.40 in rake, and a $40 pot pays the $1 cap rather than $2.

Players never see the rake leave their stack, which is why it is easy to ignore. It is also the biggest cost in poker after bad decisions. This guide explains how each type of rake is taken, what the main sites charge, how live rake compares, and what it does to a win rate.

How rake works in cash games

Cash game rake comes out of the pot before the winner collects it. Several methods exist, and some sites combine them.

Pot rake with a cap

This is the standard online method and the most common one in casinos. The site takes a set percentage of every pot, and stops taking more once it reaches the cap for that stake. To see both parts at work, follow one small pot and one big pot at the same $0.05/$0.10 table, where the cap is $1.

An $8 pot is below the point where the cap kicks in, so the site takes the full 5%: $0.40. A $40 pot would pay $2 at 5%, but the cap stops it at $1, so its real rate is 2.5%. The cap starts working at the pot size where 5% equals the cap, here $20. Online sites calculate the exact percentage, down to the cent. Many casinos still take rake in steps instead, for example $1 for every $10 in the pot, so a $19 pot pays the same $1 as a $10 one.

Most sites also lower the cap when fewer players are in the hand. At PokerStars, $0.10/$0.25 has a $2 cap with five or more players dealt in and a $0.50 cap heads-up. That makes rake per pot cheaper in blind-versus-blind and heads-up pots, though small pots still pay the full percentage.

You can see the rake on every hand you play online. Open a hand history and the summary at the bottom lists the total pot and the rake taken from it, for example a total pot of $8 with $0.40 rake. Trackers add these lines up, so after a few thousand hands you know exactly what you pay rather than guessing.

No flop, no drop, and where it no longer applies

“No flop, no drop” means a hand that ends before the flop is not raked. For years it was the rule almost everywhere: a raise that won the blinds was free. In 2026 it depends on the site.

• PokerStars and ACR Poker still take no rake from pots that end preflop.
• GGPoker rakes any pot that reached a 3-bet, even if everyone folds before the flop.
• CoinPoker has done the same since October 2026: fees are postflop-only unless there was a preflop 3-bet.

A preflop 3-bet pot is small, so each one costs only cents. But an aggressive player wins many of them, and they never show up in a cap table. Our GGPoker rake guide works one through: a 3-bet that wins a $3.25 pot at $0.25/$0.50 pays about $0.16.

Time collection and seat fees

In higher-stakes live games, many casinos stop raking pots and charge each player a fixed amount per half hour instead, called time collection. A player who plays many pots pays the same as one who folds everything, so time collection favours active, winning players. Private clubs and some legal card clubs use a similar seat fee, paid per session or per hour.

Dead drop

A few live games use a dead drop: the player on the button pays a fixed fee into the drop box before the cards are dealt, and the pot itself is not raked. Everyone pays it once per orbit, whether they play the hand or not. It works like a small extra blind that goes to the house.

Tournament and sit & go fees

Tournaments take their rake once, at registration. The lobby shows the buy-in as two numbers: the part that goes into the prize pool and the fee. That fee is quoted in two different ways, which is why the same tournament can be described as “9%” or “10%” rake. The table shows both.

The first column is the one that matters for your results, because it is what you lose from every entry. A fee of 9% means you need to beat the field by 9% just to break even, which is why fees eat so much of a tournament player’s return on investment. Our guide to ROI in poker shows how to measure that, and buy-ins in poker covers how tournament entries are priced. Freerolls have no fee at all.

Bounty tournaments split the buy-in three ways: prize pool, bounties and fee. The fee is charged on the whole entry, so a $320 bounty event on GGPoker breaks down as $147.60 to the prize pool, $150 to bounties and $22.40 in fees, which is 7% of what you pay. The bounty half does not make the fee any smaller.

Jackpot sit & gos

In lottery formats such as GGPoker’s Spin & Gold and PokerStars’ Spin & Go, there is no separate fee line. The rake is built into the table of multipliers: the average prize pool across all games is smaller than the buy-ins collected. On Spin & Gold that difference is 7% of every buy-in, the same as a 7% fee, as our guide to Spin & Gold works out from the official multiplier frequencies.

Rake in fast-fold and special formats

Fast-fold and novelty games often have their own structures, and they can be cheaper or dearer than the regular tables at the same stake.

• Zoom on PokerStars uses lower caps at the three smallest Hold’em stakes: $0.30 at $0.01/$0.02 against $1 at a regular table.
• Rush & Cash on GGPoker caps every stake at three big blinds, $1.50 at $0.25/$0.50 against $4 at a regular six-max table, and takes nothing if the table is not full.
• All-in or Fold on GGPoker charges a fixed amount per hand in big blinds instead of a share of the pot, plus a separate jackpot fee: 0.06 bb and 0.07 bb at $0.05/$0.10 during our check (November 2026).

Because fast-fold players see many more hands an hour, a lower cap per pot does not always mean less rake per hour. Compare the cost per 100 hands, which your tracker or the site’s own stats can show you.

Online rake compared

Every big site publishes a cap table, but the tables are laid out differently, so a direct comparison is rare. The table below puts the caps for the four most played No-Limit Hold’em stakes side by side, for pots with five or more players dealt in.

Read the caps in big blinds, because that is how they compare across stakes. At NL2, GGPoker’s and CoinPoker’s $0.20 cap is 10 big blinds, PokerStars’ $1 is 50 big blinds, and ACR’s $3 is 150. In practice that hardly matters at NL2, since pots there rarely pass $4. At NL100 it flips: PokerStars’ $2.50 is 2.5 big blinds, GGPoker’s and CoinPoker’s $5 is five.

Heads-up and short pots have their own, lower caps. At NL25 the two-player cap is $0.50 at PokerStars, GGPoker and CoinPoker alike, a quarter of the full cap. Each site’s full table, rake rules and rewards are in our reviews of PokerStars, GGPoker, ACR Poker and CoinPoker.

The difference shows best on one hand played at two sites. At $0.25/$0.50 you raise, only the big blind calls, and the pot reaches $30 by the river. Five percent of $30 is $1.50, but with two players in the hand the caps cut in: PokerStars takes $0.75, GGPoker $1. Now give the same $30 pot five players. PokerStars’ cap becomes $2 and GGPoker’s $4, so both take the full $1.50. Short-handed pots are where the caps save you money; multiway pots usually pay the full rate.

Caps change. CoinPoker changed its rake rules in October 2026, and PokerStars reviews its non-dollar caps every quarter. The table in the client’s table information always has the final word.

Why micro stakes pay the most rake

A cap is a fixed number of dollars, so it is a large number of big blinds at low stakes and a small one at high stakes. At NL2 the cap almost never comes into play, and nearly every pot pays the full percentage. At NL100 and above, the cap catches ordinary pots. To show this, take the same pot measured in big blinds, 100 bb, and rake it at each stake on PokerStars and GGPoker.

At NL2, NL5 and NL10 a 100 bb pot pays 5 bb on both sites. At NL100 PokerStars takes 2.5 bb, because its $2.50 cap is reached at a $50 pot, while GGPoker still takes 5 bb. At NL200 the caps bring it down to 1.4 bb and 3 bb. The same skill edge therefore turns into a much smaller profit at the lowest stakes, and moving up often lowers your rake per big blind, as long as your bankroll and skill keep pace.

Pot-Limit Omaha shows the opposite pattern at low stakes. Both PokerStars and GGPoker use lower caps for micro-stakes PLO than for Hold’em: PokerStars charges 3.3% up to $0.30 at $0.01/$0.02, and GGPoker’s PLO cap at $0.25/$0.50 is $1 against $4 in Hold’em.

Live poker rake

Live rake is much higher than online, because dealers, tables and floor space cost more than servers. In most Las Vegas casinos the standard for low-stakes No-Limit Hold’em is 10% of the pot up to $5, with some places charging up to $6 or $7, plus a jackpot drop of $1 or $2 taken for a bad beat or high-hand promotion.

The jackpot drop is not technically rake, since it is paid back to players as jackpot prizes, but it leaves the pot in the same way. Combine the two at a $1/$2 game, using 10% up to $5 and a $1 drop from pots of $20 or more, and the share taken changes sharply with pot size.

A $20 pot loses $3, 15% of it. A $40 pot loses $5, 12.5%. From $50 the full $6 is taken every time, which is 10% of a $60 pot and only 3% of a $200 one. Since most live pots at $1/$2 are small, the real average is far above the 5% online players are used to, and it is the main reason low-stakes live poker is hard to beat.

Dealer tips are a separate cost. Most live players tip the dealer after winning a pot, and that money also comes out of your winnings, even though the house never sees it. Count rake, jackpot drop and tips together when you judge whether a live game is beatable.

Before you sit down in a casino, ask the floor or the dealer three questions: what percentage is taken and up to what maximum, whether there is a jackpot drop and from what pot size, and whether the game uses time collection instead. Many casinos post the structure at the desk. A difference of $1 in the cap or the drop is worth more over a session than most players win in an hour at $1/$2.

How much rake leaves a table

Rake is easier to understand as a stream of money leaving the game than as a percentage. A rough example with stated assumptions shows the size of it. Take a six-handed NL10 table that deals 80 hands an hour, where 60% of hands see a flop and those pots average $3.

• 48 raked pots an hour, each paying 5% of $3, or $0.15
• $7.20 an hour leaves the table, 72 big blinds
• Per player that is 12 big blinds an hour, whether they win or lose

Over a month of evenings that table pays the site hundreds of dollars. The money comes from the winners’ pots at the moment it is taken, but over time it is funded by everyone’s losses, because it never returns to the table. A game is only beatable if the weaker players lose more than the rake removes, which is why the same players can be a profitable game at NL100 and a break-even one at NL2.

How rake eats into your win rate

Win rates in cash games are measured in big blinds per 100 hands (bb/100), and rake is easiest to judge in the same unit. The example below uses round numbers, chosen to show the method; your own figures come from your hand history.

Say you play six-handed at NL10 on a site that takes 5% with a $1 cap and no rake before the flop. In an average 100 hands you win 10 pots that reach the flop, worth 20 bb ($2) each. Each pays 5%, or 1 bb, so you pay 10 bb per 100 hands in rake. If your play would win 14 bb/100 with no rake, you keep 4 bb/100. The house takes more than two-thirds of your edge.

Rakeback changes that sum. A 20% return on the same 10 bb gives back 2 bb/100, and your real win rate becomes 6 bb/100, half as much again as before. That is why grinders compare rewards programmes as carefully as games. Our guide to calculating your win rate shows how to measure it properly, and short-term results are dominated by variance anyway, so judge rake over tens of thousands of hands.

Rakeback in brief

Rakeback is the part of your rake a site gives back, as cash, points or rewards. Programmes differ in how they decide whose rake it was, and that decides who benefits most:

• Dealt: the rake from a pot is shared equally among everyone dealt into the hand, even players who folded preflop. Tight players do well under this method.
• Contributed: only players who put money into the pot are credited, often in proportion to how much they put in. Active, aggressive players earn more.

The big sites in 2026 mostly use points per dollar of rake rather than a flat percentage. PokerStars pays 15% to 40% through Rewards chests, GGPoker roughly 16% to 80% through Ocean Rewards, and ACR a flat 27% or its Elite Benefits. Welcome bonuses work the same way, since they are released by rake; using them on purpose is the basis of bonus hunting.

How each site’s program works, and what it returns at different volumes, is in our guide to poker rakeback.

How to pay less rake

None of these tips fits every player. Each depends on your game, stakes and volume.

• Compare caps in big blinds at your stake, not headline percentages. At NL100 a $2.50 cap and a $5 cap are very different; at NL2 they hardly differ.
• Check fast-fold tables at the lowest stakes. PokerStars Zoom at $0.01/$0.02 caps at $0.30, against $1 at its regular tables.
• Count preflop 3-bet pots on sites that rake them, if you 3-bet a lot.
• Look at Omaha at micro stakes, where caps are lower than in Hold’em.
• Compare tournament fees by format. A 5% fee and a 10% fee are a big difference over a year of the same buy-ins.
• Use rakeback and welcome bonuses that match the volume you actually play.
• Move up when you are ready. Rake per big blind falls as stakes rise, but only a real edge at the new level makes that worth it.

Playing fewer pots or folding good spots to save rake. Rake is charged on pots you win; avoiding pots you would win just loses the profit the rake comes out of. Choose where you play, not how much you play your good hands.

Rake in poker FAQ