Poker is the one casino game where the house does not bet against you, so it charges for the seat instead. In cash games this is a percentage of each pot, commonly 5% up to a capped amount.
The cap is what matters most. A $5 cap on a 5% rake is a large proportion of a small pot and a trivial one of a large pot, which is why raked small-stakes games are considerably harder to beat than their stakes suggest.
Tournament rake is quoted separately in the buy-in: a $100 + $20 event has $100 going to the prize pool and $20 to the house, a 20% fee. It looks small next to the headline number and is the single largest cost most tournament players face.
Where the numbers come from
Related terms in poker
- Pot odds — The price a call is getting, compared against how often it needs to win.
- Outs — The cards remaining that would improve your hand to a likely winner.
- Equity — Your share of the pot, meaning how often you win it if the hand plays to showdown.
- Implied odds — The money you expect to win later if your draw comes in, beyond what is in the pot now.
- Position — Where you act in the betting order, and the largest structural edge in poker.
- Button — The dealer position, which acts last on every postflop street.
Where an entry quotes a number, that figure comes from the computed sections of this site rather than from another glossary, so the definition and the derivation cannot drift apart. Each entry links to the page where the number is worked out.