Q&A #87: Rake and Time Charges and How They Affect Winning Players
Don't miss one article! Subscribe to the Full Feed RSS or get NPA in your inbox.
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, they’ll take $2 in rake. If it’s $168, they’ll take $4, 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 where I’ve been playing regularly lately, the $1-$2 no-limit game typically has a $4 capped per-hand rake, while the $2-$5 no-limit game typically has a $5/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 will be taken out of the first pot in each half hour to reach a specified size. For instance, say you’re playing $10-$20 no-limit, and the time charge is $7 per person per half hour. At a ten player table, the total time charge each half hour is $70. If you’re playing time pots, then that entire $70 might be removed as a one-time monster rake from the first pot that reaches $300. I’ve written before about adjusting to time pots in a limit hold’em game.
Naturally, time pots make more sense in high-stakes games than low-stakes ones. 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 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, an observation that brings us to today’s question from DucksTakinDownAKSuffer:
The remainder of this article is insider content available to premium members only. Log in to your account or become a premium member and get instant access.
Tags: 1-2-no-limit, 2-5-no-limit, atlantic-city, live-play, no-limit-holdem, Playing for a Living, poker, rake, shorthanded-games, time-charge, time-pot, winrates
Foxwoods has the same time rake at $5/half hr for 1-2. The way I thought about it was in terms of how many buy-ins had to stack off to pay the house. So if a guy stacked off for a $200 buy-in, the rake was “paid” for 2 hours and all of the additional action was divided among the winning players. Did more than one person stack off every two hours? Oh baby, yes. There were some very weak players that sat down and burned off their buy-in in a couple of orbits. There was plenty of money on the table to pay the winning players.