The Rake Leak: Why Your Hourly Is Lower Than You Think
Most players hunt for leaks in their play. They review the river bluff that got snapped off, the flop they overfolded, the spot where they should have three-bet. All worth doing.
Meanwhile, the biggest single line item on their poker P&L goes uncounted: the money that leaves the table before it ever reaches their stack.
Rake isn't a tax on the game. It's a tax on you, specifically, on every pot you win — and almost nobody tracks it.
Your $2/$2 game is not their $2/$2 game
Two players sit in games with the same blinds, in the same city, and post the same result: "up about $30 an hour."
One is playing in a room that takes 10% of the pot to a $5 cap. The other is in a room that charges $7 per half hour and drops nothing from the pot. Same stakes on the sign, completely different games underneath.
The variables that quietly decide your real hourly:
- Rake percentage and cap. 10% to $5 hits far harder than 5% to $3 — and the cap matters more than the percentage, because most raked pots hit it.
- Drop structure. Whether the room takes a jackpot drop, a bad-beat drop, or a promo drop on top of the rake.
- Time charge vs. pot rake. A time game charges you whether you win a single pot or not — brutal in a short session, sometimes a bargain in a long one.
- Tips. A dollar or two per pot you drag is real money, and it is your money. Not tipping isn't the answer; not counting it is just self-deception.
None of that shows up in "I'm up $30 an hour." All of it shows up in your bankroll.
The arithmetic nobody wants to do
Run it once with your own numbers. Take a full table, roughly 30 hands dealt an hour, and say you win around five pots in that hour — a perfectly ordinary rate.
If each of those pots gets capped at $5 of rake, and you tip a dollar on each, that's about $30 an hour leaving the table through pots you won. Change the cap to $7 and add a $1 jackpot drop, and it's closer to $45.
Those are illustrative numbers, not a study — plug in what your room actually takes. But the shape holds no matter what you plug in: for a lot of small-stakes live players, the rake and tips paid in an hour are the same order of magnitude as the edge they're trying to win.
That's the uncomfortable part. If your true, rake-inclusive hourly is $8 and you thought it was $30, you haven't been beating the game by much. You've been beating the players by a lot and handing most of it to the house.
Why this leak survives so long
Three reasons, all structural rather than lazy.
It's invisible by design. Rake is taken from the pot before it's pushed. You never watch it leave your stack, so it never feels like a loss the way a lost pot does. Memory files it under "cost of doing business" and moves on.
It's per-hand, and per-hand costs are hard to hold in your head. Nobody can total five months of $5 drops from memory. That isn't a discipline failure; it's an accounting problem, and accounting problems need records, not willpower.
Most tracking tools don't ask for it. Typical poker apps let you enter a buy-in and a cash-out and call the difference your result. That number is arithmetically correct and strategically useless — it tells you what happened, not what it cost you to make it happen.
The same logic applies to any tournament you're playing in: the fee on a $100 + $10 buy-in is this exact leak wearing a different hat. Log the $110 you actually handed over — not the $100 on the poster — and your tournament ROI stops flattering you.
What tracking rake actually changes
This isn't about feeling bad. A rake-aware number is one of the few pieces of poker information that leads directly to a decision you can make this week:
- Game selection gets quantitative. "That room's game is softer" becomes a comparison you can settle: softer by how much, against a rake that's higher by how much?
- Session length gets a reason. In a time-charge game, a 90-minute stop-off carries a fixed cost that a five-hour session amortizes. That should change when you sit down and when you leave.
- Stake moves get honest. Moving up is often less about the players and more about the cap becoming a smaller fraction of the pots you win.
- Your win rate becomes real. A rake-aware hourly is the only version of the number that survives contact with your bank account.
How to start counting it
You don't need a spreadsheet habit. You need the cost recorded at the moment it's incurred, because a number you plan to reconstruct later is a number you will never reconstruct.
- Write down your room's actual structure once. Percentage, cap, every drop, and the time charge if there is one. Most players have never looked it up.
- Log the session with its costs attached — buy-in, cash-out, rake, tips, time — not just the net.
- Record tournament buy-ins at their real number, the buy-in plus the fee.
- Compare hourlies across venues after rake, not before. That's where game selection actually gets decided.
- Give it a real sample before concluding anything. One rough week isn't evidence — that's a sample-size question, and it deserves the same skepticism as any other win-rate claim.
This is the premise behind HandRecorder's bankroll side. It has cash-game rake tracking built in, so your win rate and ROI come out rake-aware rather than flattering, plus multi-currency portfolios with real-time conversion if you play in more than one country. Because recording a hand takes about 2.8 seconds with one thumb, the record actually gets kept instead of being reconstructed from memory at the end of the month. It all runs on your device: no account, no upload, nobody else looking at your numbers.
Your hourly is probably lower than you think. Finding out by how much is the cheapest edge available to you — and the only one that doesn't require playing a single hand better.
Find out what your game actually costs you. HandRecorder tracks rake, tips and fees alongside every session, so the win rate you see is the real one. Free to start on iPhone & iPad.