TPR's Online Poker Ratings

Financially speaking, this category is extremely important, often overlooked, and yet it can be difficult to separate the sites with more beneficial rake policies from the others. The “rake” is simply the amount taken from the pot by the card room, a sort of service charge. It’s the bread and butter for any host of a poker game. The one constant in any game is that you can count on the dealer or poker site to take the rake. Also, all poker sites should have a “no flop, no drop” rake policy. This means no rake will be taken if there’s no flop dealt (usually related to Texas Hold’em and Omaha only).

To score this section, the overall rake policies for each site were separately considered for limit games and Pot Limit/No Limit games. It didn’t make sense for us to include the tedious details of each poker site’s rake structure, but we did go through them all, and have provided links to easily find them to review on your own.

As far as Pot-Limit and No-Limit games go, the rake was comparable amongst all of the sites. Where the sites differed was mostly regarding their rake amounts for Limit games, as well as the rate at which the rake scaled up as the table limits went up. Sites such as PartyPoker and Doyles Room scored slightly lower because they either charged a higher rake, or increased their rake and more increments as the limits went up for a table. We preferred sights such as Poker Stars, Pacific Poker or Bodog Poker, who usually charged one rake percentage for lower limit games, and one percentage for higher limit games. This, of course, favors higher limit games, in that they take less a rake, which is something you’ll commonly find in many poker rooms online as well as in person. The sights with more favorable rakes also didn’t have overly complicated scales trying to take a rake at many different increments of Limit games. Full Tilt Poker scored high not just for having a fair rake structure, but also for providing a very generous rakeback program for new players who sign up through this site. Go to our rakeback page for details on a 27% Full Tilt rakeback.

We would like to emphasize that the rake should be considered in choosing any game, casino, and/or online poker site (even if a minor consideration). And with respect to the sites listed here, we encourage you to peruse the details of the rake policies via links we have sorted out for you on each individual site's review page under "Site Reviews."