Message Board : Q: Beating the rake

Hello to Ed and the whole hee-haw gang.

Something I hear time and time again about is beating the almighty rake. I have read much about it, but never understood the significance of it.

Why should I care how much the house makes as long as the rake it isn't a rip-off?

Is it just a gauge used to see if I am "beating a game"?

Thanks

thatjimguy

thatjimguy said:

Something I hear time and time again about is beating the almighty rake. I have read much about it, but never understood the significance of it.

thatjimguy 

The significance is that you need to beat the rake if you want to make any money.  If there were no rake, poker would be a zero-sum game and the average player would break even.  Add in a rake, and now the average player loses money.  The amount they lose is exactly equal to the rake. 

So if you want to break even, you must have a skill advantage over the average player.  The bigger the rake is, the more of a skill advantage you will need.   

Dolus said:

Factoring the rake is an important part of game selection. If you keep good records and become adept at estimating your win rate you'll be one step closer in being able to evaluate bad games or to choose better games. Its not always obvious especialy in the low limit B&M games.Its not uncommon to find low limit b&m games where the rake is insurmountable.

I disagree that it's "not uncommon" to find low limit B&M games where the rake is insurmountable. I think it's quite uncommon.

For sure, the rake is high, but usually the players are also really bad in those games. If you took your average $100-$200 players and stuck them in a $2-$4 game, then yes, the rake would probably be insurmountable. But with your average $2-$4 in there, you can usually win at a nice clip.

Having said that, people talk about how it's trivial to beat low-limit B&M games, but I think that's nonsense. It took me about 6 months of hard study and regular play to get to the point where I was beating $4-$8 regularly. Some people will learn faster than others, but either way there's a lot of knowledge and experience that go into beating those games.

The bottom line is, small B&M games can be tricky to learn to beat, but most of them are quite beatable despite the high rake once you've developed the skill-set. If you aren't there yet, just keep plugging away and learning and eventually you'll get there.

Durun said:

What about heads up? would a rake of 10% capped at 3$ be too much for a 10-20 heads up game?

That's a stiff rake. You'd have to be against someone pretty bad to beat a rake like that for anything significant.

Talking about bad rake, consider the only option I have:

10% rake at a 2-4 Limit game capped at 10…

I'm not completely sure that this is profitable in the long run…the players are pretty bad most of the time.

Other games available there are 5-10 Limit, or 2-2 No Limit, both with 5% rake, but my bankroll is not up to that yet.. :( 

Capped at 10 ! That's insane. Is the cap the same in other games? My place is 10% for most games, but capped at 5 ( or 6 if bad beat game )  10, that 's vicious.

Hi guys.

The only B&M casino I can play at has the following tables

 1 2 max buy in 100 rake 10% capped at 10

or

 2 5 max buy in 200 rake 10% capped at 15

Needless to say this is robbery, but I have no choice for live games

I don’t bother with the $1 $2 lottery but I was wondering if it’s actually possible to beat the rake on the $2 $5 with the rake capped at $15

I must say the table is usually pretty wild. It’s not uncommon to have 6 players seeing a flop at $25. Table is usually composed of 2/3 tags 2/3 rocks and the rest a mix of lags and maniacs.

 If you think the rake is even beatable ona table like this, which strategy would be best to adopt.

 thanks for any advice/opinions