The action is folded around to the small blind. Without looking at their cards, they look towards the player in the big blind, who nods, and makes a chopping gesture with their hand.

But in this casino one dollar is taken out before the flop, from the chips the small blind put out.

Who paid the rake? Both of them?

In this very specific context, it's pretty obvious that the small blind pays the rake.

And in this very specific context, SB is also the loser of the hand, because he lost money out of his own pocket.

In high-stakes games, the house collects a time charge rather than raking the pot. In some games, players prefer to play "time pots," where the time is taken out of the next (sufficiently large) pot.

Suppose the dealer changes, and the cards are dealt. A particular player, outside of the blinds, has a trash hand and folds. The pot turns out to be big enough to collect time from.

Did the player who folded pay any time?

In this more macro context, everyone writes a check to pay for the cost of playing, but a winning player is still paying the cost with someone else’s money.

Consider the following:

One player, Jack, is so good he will win every hand with a $1 bet. There are 8 other players who always call, each losing $1, so Jack wins $8 per hand. 10 hands are played.

Case A: No Rake: Jack wins a total of 10*8=$ 80 and the other 8 players each lose $1

Case B: Rake Game: 50 cents rake is taken out of each pot for a total of $5. Jack wins $80 - 5$ = $75. The other 8 players again each lose $8.

Clearly only the winner, Jack, paid rake

To say that everybody pays the rake is true only if all players are of equal capability. If a player always wins, he pays all the rake. If a player never wins, he never pays rake. Therefore, for each hand the winner pays the rake and since there will always be more than one winner over a set of hands, in this sense, all or most all pay will pay the rake assuming all can win some hands.

However, on average, the better players will pay more rake than lesser capability opponents.

Yes, in one sense that is true, but as I showed in the above post, the losing players lose the same amount in a raked game as in a no-rake game.

By that logic did player 2 also pay for player 1s dinner? Or rent? Or car?

Player 1 pays the rake. Doesn't matter that it was players 2s money before

This isn't really a debatable topic either. I'm surprised this many ppl actually think it is

It's a fundamental concept in poker that when you put money into the pot it is no longer yours

Except in reality the players who win the most pots are usually not net winners, because they play too loose.

So then it becomes looser players pay more rake and tighter players pay less which I think is the best (most useful) way to look at it.

This is why context matters.

In this very specific hand, player 1 is still not paying for any rake, fee, or whatever you want to call it. Player 2 is paying for it from his stack.

Clearly it isn't, except you can't seem to see it.

I put $100 in the pot and I came out with $195.

But somehow I am the one paying for the $5 fee?

Player A and Player each bring in $100 and get into a HU poker sit'n'go. There is a $10 flat fee to play the game.

There are 3 different rationales as to who's actually "paying":

1. If the money is collected ahead of time, then both people paid for it, because they each gave up $5 to play before the outcome is decided.

2. If the money is collected after the game, winner pays for it, because winner is the only one left with money.

3. Whoever has less money before the occurrence of this event is the one actually paying for it. Winner +$195, loser -$100.

We can argue all day on the perception, but it would seem the most logical that the person with less money is the one end up paying for it.

I'll try to explain in another way.

If we remove all the losers from a player pool in a typical casino raked game, then who's going to pay the rake?

If you can't come up with a scenario that all the winners can all remain winners and still pay for the rake, then I guess it's pretty clear who are the ones paying the rake...

We have clearly established that there are several different ways to look at it, and none are clearly right or wrong. But the only way that seems to be in any way useful in really world games is that looser players pay more rake and tighter players pay less.