Pot-limit games and rake

[Ghazban]

When determining the maximum bet a player can make in a pot-limit game that is raked (and not charged by time), does money removed from the pot to pay the rake qualify in terms of the maximum bet size or not? For example, if 4 people each put in $25 to see a flop, there is $100 in the pot. Now say $2 is taken out in rake. Can the first bettor on the flop bet $100 or only $98?

The thing that got me wondering about this is that, on Ultimate Bet, the "bet pot" button bets the size of the pot+rake while the Party "bet pot" checkbox bets the size of the pot after the rake has been taken out. I play primarily no-limit on both sites (rather than pot-limit) but as I'm trying to practice up on my PLO at microlimits, I was curious.

[Rudbaeck]

Reasonably the UB way of doing it is correct.

[muck_nutz]

I'd never seen this issue before playing online. All the big bet games I played in were time collection. So I don't think there is much in the way of standards for this.

If you think of PL as the ability to bet an amount which offers your opponent 2:1 then removing the rake makes a certain amount of sense.

In any resonable sized game it just doesn't make a difference. I'm guessing that whomever wrote the stars code was just reuseing some limit code which kept track of the pot size minus the rake. I doubt they thought about it very deeply.

[Phat Mack]

In all of the live games I've played in, raked money counts as part of the pot. Most good rules books address this.

Another thing to note is that most PL live games have a "rounding up" rule that helps speed up play. A player betting at $98 pot would be allowed to round up to $100. This helps to avoid arguments about how much is in the pot, demands for count downs, and the time-consuming use of small chips. The amount that can be rounded up depends on the size of the game.