How The Rake Is Actually Taken
Three rules do all the work. Get them straight and the rest of this page is arithmetic.
No flop, no drop
If the hand ends before a flop is dealt, nothing is taken. Every pot you steal preflop, every walk in the big blind, every hand folded around costs zero. This is the single most important structural fact about the rake, and it is why your rake bill is driven by how often you see flops rather than by how many hands you are dealt.
A percentage of the pot, not of your stack
Once a flop is dealt, the tracked rate is 5% of the final pot. It comes out of the middle, which means it is charged to whoever wins the hand, and averaged across a table it is charged to everyone who contested it. You never see a debit. You just receive a slightly smaller pot than the one you counted.
A hard ceiling per hand
The rake stops at 5 SC no matter how large the pot gets. A cap only helps in pots big enough to reach it. Since the rate is 5%, the cap does not bind until a pot passes 100 SC — so at small stakes it is decoration, and at higher stakes it is a genuine discount on the biggest pots you play.
Rake Impact & EV Calculator
Set your stake, your volume, and your win rate before rake. The default win rate is zero, which is the interesting case: a player who is exactly as good as the game. Watch what the house does to that player.
Your session
Model assumptions — edit these
Assumption, not a measured figure. Only these hands are raked.
Assumption. We publish no average-pot statistic; put your own tracker's number in.
Tracked rakeback is 30%. Assumes you fully qualify for the programme. Terms change.
Net SC after rake
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Rake / hour
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Rake / session
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Rakeback back
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Breakeven needs
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Working
Verified inputs to this model: the rake rate, the per-hand cap, the no flop no drop rule, and the rakeback rate, all from the Bonus Sensei tracker. Everything else — hands per hour, flop frequency, average raked pot, and whether you qualify for rakeback at all — is an assumption you set, shown above with its default. The model also assumes every raked pot is the same size, which understates the effect of the cap in a game with a wide pot distribution. It is a planning tool, not an accounting statement.
Why Breakeven Is Losing
A win rate quoted before rake describes your edge against the other players at the table. Zero means you take exactly as much off them as they take off you. The house is a separate participant, and it does not lose hands. It removes 5% of every contested pot regardless of who wins, so the sum of all players' results is negative by exactly the amount raked.
That is the whole trick, and it is why "I'm about even" is almost never true. Break the calculator's default case down: a full ring session where roughly a third of hands reach a flop, at a stake where the 5 SC cap never comes close to binding, charges the table a steady drip that no amount of solid, unremarkable play recovers. To finish flat you must beat the other players by more than the rake, every hour, forever.
The cap is a stakes question, not a rake question
Because the ceiling is 5 SC and the rate is 5%, it only engages once a pot clears 100 SC. At micro stakes that essentially never happens, so you pay the full percentage on every raked hand and the cap does nothing for you. Moving up does not reduce the percentage — it just means more of your biggest pots run into the ceiling and get a discount. Any claim that the cap makes the game cheap should be checked against the pot sizes you actually play.
What Rakeback Actually Returns
Our tracker records the rakeback rate at 30%. Applied cleanly, that turns the effective cost of a raked pot into roughly seven-tenths of the headline rate. It is a real and substantial offset. It is also not a refund: seventy cents of every dollar raked stays gone, so a breakeven-before-rake player is still a losing player with rakeback switched on. Toggle it in the calculator and watch the net figure move up without crossing zero.
Three cautions, none of them cynical. Rakeback programmes carry qualification conditions — tiers, activity thresholds, time windows — and we do not publish those because they change. The reward may arrive as Sweeps Coins, Gold Coins, or a promotional credit, and those are not equivalent: only SC redeems. And the rate itself is a promotional term the operator can revise at any time. Check the current terms in your own account before you plan around them.
Tournaments: The 10% Fee
Tournaments price the house's cut differently. Instead of a running percentage of pots, there is a flat entry fee — tracked at 10% — charged once, on top of the amount that goes into the prize pool. Enter a tournament whose prize-pool contribution is 10 SC and you are charged 11 SC total, of which 1 SC is fee. That arithmetic is fixed and knowable before you click register, which is the format's genuine advantage.
| Dimension | Cash game | Tournament |
|---|---|---|
| Headline cost | 5% of each contested pot | 10% of the buy-in |
| When it is charged | Continuously, per raked hand | Once, at registration |
| Ceiling | 5 SC per hand | The fee itself is the ceiling |
| Cost per hour | Scales with stake, volume and flop frequency | Falls the longer you survive |
| Knowable in advance | No, only estimable | Yes, exactly |
Which is cheaper per hour is not a fact we can publish, because it depends entirely on how long you last. A fee paid once and amortised over a deep run is cheap. The same fee paid three times in an hour of re-entries is not. Run your cash-game side through the calculator above, then compare it against the fee you are about to pay for the time you realistically expect to play.
Rake Is A Redemption Problem Too
Rake does not just shrink your win rate. It slows the only thing that converts play into money: reaching the minimum. Global Poker's tracked minimum redemption is 50 SC, and every SC the house takes is an SC that has to be re-won before you get there. On the free-play side, the daily claim is tracked at $0.45 with a 30s cooldown, and the postal AMOE route is tracked at 5 SC per request — meaning 10 successful requests to reach the minimum from mail alone.
Once you do request, our tracked window is 2–7 days across 3 methods: Bank/ACH, Gift Card (Prizeout), Skrill. The platform is unavailable in 16 states, so check eligibility before you build a bankroll you cannot cash. The full timeline breakdown is in the payout times guide.
SC tables are the only ones this math applies to
Gold Coin pots are play money in both directions — nothing taken from a GC pot could ever have been redeemed, so GC rake costs you nothing real. Every figure on this page is Sweeps Coins. If you are not sure which currency your table is in, that is the first thing to fix: read SC vs GC before you read anything else here again.
Next Steps
Sort out the currency question in SC vs GC, check how long the money takes to arrive in payout times, separate rake losses from suspicion in Is Global Poker Rigged?, or weigh the platform against the other poker-shaped option in Global Poker vs ClubWPT. The raw tracker record lives on the Global Poker profile, and every tool is indexed in the calculator directory.