Beating the Rake

Almost everyone is familiar with a per-hand rake. In each pot, the house takes out a few dollars as its cut. In live play, this rake is often taken $1 for every $10 in the pot, capped at $4 per pot (in the United States). So, if the final pot is $22, $2 in rake is taken. If it’s $168, $4 is taken, because $4 is the cap.

Sometimes, especially in higher-stakes games, the house will take a time charge in lieu of a rake. This is a fixed fee that you pay every time a new dealer sits down (every half-hour). In Atlantic City, the $1-$2 no-limit hold’em game typically has a $4-capped per-hand rake, while the $2-$5 no-limit game typically has a $5 per half-hour time charge.

Sometimes the players will agree to play time pots instead of paying the time charge. In this variation, the time charge for the whole table is taken out of the first pot in each half-hour that reaches a specified size. For instance, let’s say you’re playing $10-$20 no-limit, and the time charge is $7 per person per half-hour. At a 10-player table, the total time charge each half-hour is $70. If you’re playing time pots, that entire $70 might be removed as a one-time monster rake from the first pot that reaches $300.

Naturally, time pots make more sense in high-stakes games than low-stakes games. If you’re playing $1-$2 no-limit and the time charge is $5 per person per half-hour, it wouldn’t make much sense to take $50 out of the first pot to reach, say, $200, because no pot might reach that much during the whole half-hour. At low stakes, the house’s cut is typically a much larger percentage of final pot sizes than it is at high stakes, which is an observation that brings us to a question from one of my readers:

Are the $1-$2 and $2-$5 no-limit hold’em games at my local casino not profitable?

My casino does not have a rake, but instead has a time charge.

For $1-$2 no-limit, the charge per player is $5 per half-hour.

For $2-$5 no-limit, the charge per player is $6 per half-hour.

After doing some research, it seems that a realistic win rate would be about $6 profit per 100 hands in a $1-$2 game. It would take about three hours to play 100 hands and win $6, on average, but in that time, the casino would have taken $30 in time charges.

So, are these games unbeatable?

That time charge in $1-$2 is a bit on the high side; nevertheless, I think your $1-$2 and $2-$5 games should still be eminently beatable.

A common way to evaluate the size of a rake structure is simply to determine how much the house is taking per hour. With a time charge, that’s easy to do. At $5 per half-hour per person, it’s taking $100 per hour in a 10-handed game. With a rake, you have to do a little estimating. Let’s say you’re averaging about 30 hands per hour. (I’ve heard estimates as low as 20 hands per hour recently, but that seems a little low to me in the games I play. That would imply that each dealer gets only one orbit out per half-hour down. I think most dealers get at least partway into a second orbit, and I can’t remember the last time a dealer didn’t get around the table even one time.) And let’s say you’re averaging $2.50 per hand in rake. (I pulled that number out of thin air.) At $2.50 per hand and 30 hands per hour, that’s $75 per hour coming off the table. So, the time charge is 33 percent higher than a rake would be.

Rake adds the additional complication that you can adjust how much rake you pay by adjusting how many pots you play. The more pots, the more rake. If you’re always a tight player, you’ll pay somewhat less than your share of the rake, since you’ll win fewer pots per hour, on average. If you loosen up in favorable game conditions, however, you might actually win more than the average number of pots per hour, and you might pay more than average in rake. Additionally, if you make the pots you win larger (on average) than the pots you lose, you’ll be paying more rake.

I go through this comparison as an alternative to the math that my reader provided, which is based on assuming certain win rates and working backward. Overall, $5 per half-hour is a slightly worse structure for a $1-$2 game than is a rake of 10 percent up to $4. But the difference should be only a few dollars per hour. So, if you can beat a raked $1-$2 game, you probably can beat a $5 per half-hour game. (If the game goes shorthanded, time charge becomes much more preferable.) I think my reader erred by assuming a win rate far lower than a good player can reasonably expect to attain.

Basically, I think the $5 and $6 per half-hour time charges are a hair on the high side, probably about $1 per half-hour higher (on average) than a traditional rake would be. But, a good player can beat $1-$2 and $2-$5 no-limit for significantly more than $2 per hour, so while this extra charge could cut a good player’s win rate (in $1-$2, perhaps by as much as 20 percent or 30 percent), I doubt that it’s enough of a difference to turn a solid winner into a break-even player or a loser.

As a final note, if you play $2-$5, you might try to convince your opponents to play time pots. You could suggest that you’ll put up the $60 time charge each half-hour, and then get paid back $30 out of the first two pots in that half-hour that reach $120. (If you don’t get two such pots, everyone will just pay you his share of the remaining balance.) If your game is loose, you could hit those two pots fairly early and play rake-free for perhaps half of each down. If you play a pot-size-awareness game while the time pots are still on, and avoid bloating pots when you have only a small edge, you can conceivably lower your share of the house take to significantly less than what you’d pay in a normal rake structure. The downside is that you have to pay close attention to the action and (politely) demand your money from recalcitrant winners. But if you’re worried about rake, playing time pots could save you quite a bit.

Ed is a featured coach at StoxPoker.com. Also check out his online poker advice column, NotedPokerAuthority.com. He has authored four books on poker, most recently, Professional No-Limit Hold’em: Volume 1.