Make a Living Playing Online Poker

There's a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that people don't want you to know about. Almost every professional player knows about this secret and they've found a way to profit from it. So can you.

Many people are unaware that whenever you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based on their rate structure it could be as much as 5% of the pot value. That fee is called "the rake."

But that's not the big secret. The big secret is that you can get a large percentage of that money back!

Online poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over anywhere between $1 million - $3 million a day. Their biggest cost is acquiring new customers. One of the ways they get new customers is to pay webmasters to put ad banners and links on their sites to entice you to play on that particular poker site.

But the webmasters aren't stupid. They know that the people they are sending to the poker room might generate hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees or rake and they've shrewdly negotiated profit sharing deals with the poker sites. In many cases the webmasters are earning 35% or more of the fees/rake you generate playing on the poker site. And not just for a month or a year but for as long as you're a customer!

But then the leading players - those who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, there are people paying $30,000+ per month in rake every month) - started to wonder why these webmasters were making all of this money when the player was the one actually generating the rake.

The greedy webmasters didn't want to give up any of their cut and so they threatened the poker rooms to keep quite about how much money they were making. But the smart players already knew. And many of them decided to create a new system.

What they said was, "Hey, I'll become a webmaster too. And if the poker room is paying me 35% I'll give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service." Now, if you do the math, the top level guys generating $30,000 a month in rake all of a sudden were getting a windfall $9,900 a month back! That's over and above anything they might have won at the table, bonuses the site may have offered, or any other perks the site might have offered them for being such a good customer.

Now most people are reading this and think that there's no way they can generate $30,000 a month so it's only profitable for the big guys. Actually, anybody can sign up at these sites. No matter how big or small a player they are.

And one doesn't need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes in order to make a respectable income from playing poker. For instance, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and can play four tables at a time (which is very doable with some practice) and play 42 hours a week, you could make approximately $76,000 a year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you would be getting about $76,000 a year back.

That's not a bad living for most people. And if you play higher stakes, more hours, more tables, or actually win money playing poker then your annual take gets even larger.

Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer who will sack you the second sales drop. You have the freedom to work when you want and as much as you want.

But if you had to do it just on your winnings alone you might never get there. You would have to play either very high stakes or for so many hours that most people would burn out. All thanks to rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everyone.

If you would like to learn more about rakeback, check out the links in my signature and get started on getting back what you deserve.