I thought it would be more, honestly. Marsh and I were discussing how different styles of play will affect one’s sugar:rake ratio. A player who is up $50 after dozens of hands of roller-coaster poker is going to have paid a ton more rake than a player who is up $50 after one hand. Is there a style that best maximizes EV + rake reduction?
Also, to drive home the point of the severity of the rake, consider this: in full games where the rake is never capped (i.e., it’s 5% of each pot), the rake would represent 10% of your sugar if you never lost a pot. That’s the minimum.
Let’s say you are in the small blind with $10, and the big blind has you covered. It folds to you, and you end up all in against the BB and win. The pot is $20, the house takes $1 (5%), and you take $19. Your net is $9, so your ratio of sugar to rake is:
9:1
so the house gets 10% of your sugar, and that’s the best ratio possible. Let’s say it’s the next hand and you lose $3. Now your sugar-to-rake ratio is:
6:1
Just like that, the house has 16.67% of your sugar. We think of the rake as “5%,” but when you take into account that a big chunk of the pot being raked was your money to begin with, and that you will inevitably lose hands, you can watch your “% of sugar paid to rake” figure skyrocket.
Before the rakeback, my sugar-to-rake ratio for November was:
$89.9:$26.3, or 3.42:1. That’s 23% of my sugar raked away.
Now, let’s factor in cakeback. They gave me a third of that $26.30 back ($8.68), which changes the ratio to:
$98.58:$17.62, or 5.6:1. That’s 15% of my sugar raked away.
The moral: rake sucks, but 33% rakeback is significant. Just ask Marsh, who got over $50 in rakeback for November. A full Cake challenge buyin for one month of rakeback! I’ll run Marsh’s ratios later to see what kind of % rake our different styles produced in November.
1 comment:
Just stating the obvious but for NL games you want to win fewer big pots to minimize rake. Stealing blinds is worthless. In LV, I've seen tables fold to the SB who raises the BB out of $2...then tip the dealer a buck! That's like worst case scenario except for the BB taking the SB in a walk then giving THAT to the dealer.
Also, I think you want to keep your variance down, no? Getting to 10x your stake by churning up and down the scale will cost a ton more than if you could get there directly. Kinda like the slot player who brings $100 but runs their winnings back through and end up playing muliple hundreds of dollars by the time their session is through. With no long term positive expectancy that is a sure fire way to go bust. Not the same case for Caking it but something to consider when your BEST case pre-rakeback is the equivalent of having one pot out of ten taken away from you in a rakeless game. 10% seems absurd when you think of the double ding penalty as Ryan points out. At least it caps relatively early compared to .02/.04.
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