The Future is Now

[Silybum]

A few years ago, while working as a prop in Garden City, a Northern California cardroom, I started comparing notes with the other player-employees at the casino and discovered something startling... not a single prop was winning at the 2-4 limits. We were beating the higher limits just fine... but 2-4 was unbeatable for us. I wondered why this should be the case. The answer is simple.

With online poker, the rake is slightly more favorable than in bricks and mortar cardrooms... the standard rake structure is 5% of the pot in $1 increments up to $3. But online poker is much faster than bricks and mortar cardrooms, which means that an online poker site is actually raking more per hour from each table than it's land-based counterparts. An average 2-4 player online will pay about $12/hr to the house, while a higher-limit player pays about $18/hr. This really adds up. A high-limit online poker professional playing one table for forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, can expect to pay about $40,000 to the house. No wonder so many people are losing at poker.