What is rake in poker?

Rake has three parts

Live poker rake is set by three things together. Any one of them on its own tells you very little.

Because of the cap, the 5% vs 10% gap disappears

This is the part that gets misread most often. The percentage only matters while the pot is small. Once the cap is reached, the difference is zero.

Below is the rake by pot size at 50/100 (BB = 100) with a cap of 4BB = 400.

The 10% side reaches the cap at a pot of 4,000, and the 5% side at 8,000. In other words, once the pot passes 8,000 both rooms take exactly the same. The 5% only helps below that.

Put another way, a 5% room is better for games where you grind a lot of smaller pots. At a table with big pots, the cap figure (4BB or 5BB) matters more than the percentage.

The jackpot drop comes out separately

The drop is taken every hand regardless of the cap. Miss it and the ranking changes.

Below is the total taken from a single capped hand at 50/100 (cap plus drop), using the real figures we list.

By percentage alone the 5% rooms look cheapest, but on capped pots the order can flip. You cannot work out the real cost without counting the drop.

Rooms marked unknown or unconfirmed are left out of this table. We only list figures we could confirm.

Las Vegas: you have to read cap plus drop together

Vegas rake looks uniform — around 10% with a $5-ish cap everywhere. Add the jackpot or promotional drop and the spread is close to double. The drop is separate from the cap and comes out every hand.

Two rooms can both cap at $5 and still cost $5 versus $10 once the drop is counted. A room with no drop also runs no promotions or jackpots, so if you are not going to collect that value back, you are simply paying less. For a short trip where you are not chasing a jackpot, picking the smaller drop is the rational choice.

These are maximums, so the real per-hand average is lower. Drops are often staged too, so small pots do not pay the full amount.

Los Angeles is a flat drop, which changes the maths completely

California card rooms cannot legally take a percentage of the pot, so they take a fixed amount per hand regardless of pot size. It is neither a percentage nor a cap, so none of the above carries over directly.

The main LA rooms charge $4–$7 per hand from $1-2 up to $5-5. Converted to an effective rate, it gets brutal as pots get smaller.

This is the exact inverse of a percentage-plus-cap structure. A percentage is light on small pots and flattens out on big ones; a flat drop is crushing on small pots and gets lighter as pots grow.

In big blinds: at $1-2 (BB = $2) a flat $7 is 3.5BB every single hand. Compare that with a $5 cap at Vegas 1/3, which is 1.7BB and only reached on larger pots.

The trade-off is that the heavy rake makes it hard for professionals to grind there, so the games are said to be soft. Playing lots of small pots does not work in LA, so you end up tightening up and pushing towards bigger pots. Above $10-20 the structure switches to a time collection of roughly $10–15 per half hour, and there more hands per hour works in your favour.

See the Los Angeles card rooms →

Taiwan is time-limited, so there is no rake at all

In Taiwan, cash games played for money are illegal and only tournaments — contests of skill — are legal. So the rooms run time-limited cash: you buy one session with a fixed clock, and whatever stack you hold at the end is settled by ICM.

That means nothing is taken out of the pot at all. The cost is the entry fee on top of the buy-in, charged once per session.

The fee is 9.1% of the buy-in, but it is charged per session, not per hand. Live, 120 minutes is roughly 50 to 60 hands, so per hand that works out at about NT$18, or 0.045BB.

On the numbers alone Taiwan is cheaper by an order of magnitude. But this is comparing a rake with an entry fee, so they are not strictly the same thing. In practice these constraints apply:

• You cannot take your stack and leave mid-session. Everything is settled by ICM at the end, so there is no walking away while you are ahead
• Re-entry costs the fee again. Bust early and often and the effective cost climbs
• Stacks reset every session, so you cannot build and play a deep stack
• Blinds go up partway through, so stacks get relatively shallower late. In practice it behaves like a tournament

Put the other way round: if you are going to play for a set block of time, the cost is very low. Being able to put in hands without worrying about rake is something no other area on this site offers.

See the Taipei poker rooms →

Vegas is "no flop, no drop"

Almost every Las Vegas poker room uses no flop, no drop: no rake is taken from a hand that ends before the flop.

A hand where everyone folds to a preflop raise is raked zero, so the tighter you play, the lower your real rake burden. The average rake per hand ends up well below the cap figure.

Rake is also typically taken in $1 increments, stepping up as the pot grows.

Asia is far heavier than Vegas once you normalise

Comparing rake in currency terms is meaningless. Convert it to big blinds and you can line it up on the same scale. Vegas caps in dollars while Asia caps in BB, so normalising makes the gap obvious.

25/50 in Asia costs three to five times what Vegas does in rake. And because the Vegas cap is a fixed dollar amount, moving up in stakes makes it lighter in BB terms — at 2/5 it tops out at about 1BB a hand.

Vegas rake varies by room between $5 and $6, and jackpot drops between $0 and $3. Sources also disagree, so treat the listed figures as a guide.

So how do you choose?

• Grinding lots of small pots — the rake percentage (5% vs 10%) is what matters
• Playing big pots — the percentage stops mattering and the cap figure (4BB vs 5BB) decides it
• The jackpot drop is fixed per hand, so it bites harder the more hands you play. Worth checking before the rake percentage
• If you can move up in stakes, Vegas is dramatically lighter — the dollar cap means 2/5 and above land near 1BB per hand
• Rake changes on the ground. What we list is what was confirmed at the time; assume you should check before you visit

Compare all 53 poker rooms by rake →

Poker rooms by area

• Poker rooms in Manila8 rooms listed
• Poker rooms in Angeles3 rooms listed
• Poker rooms in Cebu4 rooms listed
• Poker rooms in Seoul & Incheon3 rooms listed
• Poker rooms in Jeju2 rooms listed
• Poker rooms in Macau2 rooms listed
• Poker rooms in Taipei8 rooms listed
• Poker rooms in Las Vegas — the Strip9 rooms listed
• Poker rooms in Las Vegas — locals & downtown8 rooms listed
• Poker rooms in Los Angeles6 rooms listed