There is a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that folks do not want you to know about. Nearly all professional player knows about this secret and they have found a way to profit from it. So can you.

Many individuals are unaware that whenever you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based upon their rate structure it may be just as much as 5% of the pot value. That fee is called “the rake.”

But that is not the big secret. The big secret is that you can get a big portion 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. Among the ways they get new customers is to pay webmasters to put ad banners and New Express Adobe blog post links on their own sites to entice you to play on that specific poker site.

But the webmasters are not stupid. They know that the individuals they may be 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 will be earning 35% or maybe more of the fees/rake you generate playing on the poker site. And not only for a month or a year but for as long as you are a customer!

But then the leading players – those that generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you will discover people paying $30,000+ each month in rake every month) – started to wonder why these webmasters were making all of this money in the event the player was the one actually generating the rake.

The greedy webmasters did not want to quit any of their cut and so they threatened the poker rooms to keep quite about how much money they were making. However the smart players already knew. And lots of of them decided to produce a whole new system.

What they said was, “Hey, I will become a webmaster too. And should the poker room is paying me 35% I will give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service.” Fundamentally, if you do the math, the very best level guys generating thirty thousand dollars a month in rake all of a sudden were acquiring 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 great customer.

Now plenty of people are reading this and feel that there’s no way they can generate thirty thousand dollars a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. Actually, anyone can sign up at these sites. No matter how big or small a player they are.

And one will not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes as a way to make a respectable income from playing poker. By way of example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and will play four tables at a time (which is very doable with some practice) and play 42 hours every week, you might make approximately $76,000 each year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you would be getting about seventy six thousand dollars annually back.

That is not a bad living for some people. And if you play higher stakes, more hours, more tables, or actually win money playing poker then your once-a-year take gets even larger.

Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer who shall sack you the next sales drop. You have the freedom to work whenever you want and just as much as you want.

But if you had to do it just on your winnings alone you could never get there. You might have to play either quite high stakes or for a lot of hours that most individuals would burn out. All because of rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everybody.