Thanks for the valuable contribution to the discussion at hand.

grunching, so not sure if this has been mentioned, and im not usually a grammar nit like this, but cringe at "unproportionally."

try disproportionally next time please.

edit: lol should have checked the last post. i do think its worth mentioning though, and not overly nitty to correct.

To those who say the price (rake) is too high: How can the price be too high if you are still playing? It might be too low.

Still sucks though.

A year ago i tried for fun UB NL2 HU.
I think you have to be superuser to beat that game.Rake is just ridic big.
Well.I played like 2 days and i payd 57$ in rake.
I remember i sit down with 4$ (200bb tbls)and villain also 4$ and when i busted him like 30 minutes later i was having like 6.5$ stack.So most of the money went to rake...

This is so true. As soon as poker becomes regulated in the United States, the current business(rake) model will become obsolete. There will be much more competition to the Pokerstar/FullTilt monopoly. The major web companies will enter the market. The video game companies will enter the market. I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard launches their own poker site on battle.net. The days of having to pay thousands of dollars a month in rake are numbered.

The reason is because there are no competition right now. It's a monopoly and the U.S. players are stuck in it.

Lets hope this happens before we die..

I don't know about you but I don't plan on dying by the end of next year.

It's totally true.

I'm a SSNL player (NL50 @ FTP) and this month I'm gonna pay close to 8k of rake. 8k! It's about the 300% of my expected winrate! FTW! I could feed three italian families for 1 month with my taxes!

Our work sucks.

The point is that the right price isn't determined by what we want. And if this monopoly you speak of is the actual issue, the high rake is just a symptom. We should be complaining about the monopoly instead.

yeah, its at this point that you have to look at it and go, lol thats ridiculous.

I pay $50 per HOUR in rake to ftp. After rakeback. Thats insane.

what is the ftp yearly gross and net numbers?

Yeah! It's totally insane. Afterall, i do mass a huge number of hands playing Rush Poker, and leave ftp for somethingh like ipoker.com with a good rb deal (could have 40%) but playing less and less hands is not ev+ right now. I've to skip to NL100 at least (hope next month), before do some maths and decide what to do.

I've not yearly gross because I started to play @ FTP seriously since August. I'm doing 95$ avg of DAILY rb (353$ of MGR/day) playing NL50 4x for 10 hours/day; gross'll exceed 10k$! It's ****ing hard job and i pay 3 times what i'm gonna earn.

It's ridicouls and i'ts not an exciting view for cash game.it if it'll be never allow. Rake will be higher that .com for sure (maybe 15/20% of the pot) and ps.fr has already shown how the taxes could engrave the total profit.
If i would start the road to sne, i've to pay 125k€! Morover there are taxes on winnings (theoretically).

Rakeback? wtf is that? GTFO you ****ing ******. I am not nearly as affected as a 25nl 50nl or 100nl. I am arguing my stance on the side of all poker players at low and mid stakes. The low stakes guys bottomline is way more affected by rake then my bottomline at midstakes.

By the way, I play on multiple sites. thank you captain obvious.

After 100k hands of SSPLO I've paid 150BIs in rake. Not fun

The rake is less like a tax, and more like your cost of sales.
So your actual "profit after rake" is like your EBITDA.

So if the rake gobbles up 80% of your "earnings", you still have 20% margins wich is above average!

Some players move to countries where there are no income taxes, and if you take care of your health and not make marathon sessions, your depreciation is also small so its a good business to be in!

rememebr, poker sites have huge marketing billls. all those commercials, sponsorship deals, banners, adds, etc. cost a lot of money.

The only players who pay the sites any money are the losing players. Why is this so difficult to understand? You did not pay the site $183058 (or whatever) in rake as the money was not yours in the first place. Essentially, rake is just a way of splitting the money from fish between the poker sites and the winning players. Winning players do not pay anything...

This is so wrong. The money collected from the pot belongs to the winning players. If there was no rake, the money would go to the winning player. The losing players have no claim to the money they lost. Winning players pay a (outrageous) portion of their winnings to rake.

i haven't seen a good calculation of how much market it cost. would you support your view with some solid facts and numbers?
Base on the numbers I have seen in other theads (base on partypoker annual results), the major sites net over a billion dollars a year.

It's coming up over and over again. It's just plain wrong.
Using your argument you could say losing players don't pay anything as they lose anyway so it doesn't matter if they lose to other player or to the site.

I've been to one in New Mexico, you had to place 50c per hand of BJ, that went straight to the tax man.

Whatevs there was a site, "World Poker Echange" that gave players 100% rakeack and noone ever played on it. Why? because they didnt have any cool black and white commercials with Phil Ivey on it. Well cool B&W commercials cost money.

if i got more rakeback id be á happy happy camper!

I really really hope you are right, it would be great if things were fair. Great for us and for the game.

The only solution to rake is to only play freerolls.

I'd argue that the rake in a cash game pot is incorrectly attributed to the winner. The rake paid, and thus rakeback, should be proportioned to the betting parties in the pot. As it is, the loser(s) in a cash game pots gets no rakeback as all the rake in that pot is deemed to be paid by the winner. This is rubbish. Rebates should be proportionate to action not whether you won the pot or not. In SNGs and tourneys, the rake is calculated as it should be, proportionate to your action. If they calculated rake and rakeback in tourneys like cash games, you wouldn't get ANY rakeback if you don't cash, and if you take down 1st and it was say 20% of prizepool, you'd get like 20% of all the rakeback in that tourney.
Just like other gambling rebates in casinos, rakeback should be proportional to action.
Stop complaining about cashgame rake as a winner, you are already getting far more rebate than the action you provided.