There is a dirty little secret going on in the online poker world that individuals don’t want you to learn about. Virtually every professional player knows about this secret and they have found a way to cash in on it. So can you.

A lot of men and women are unaware that any time you play online trusted poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. Based upon their rate structure it could be around 5% of the pot value. That fee is called “the rake.”

But that is not the big secret. The big secret is the fact that you may get a big portion of that money back!

Online poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over ranging from $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 links on their own sites to entice you to play on that specific poker site.

However the webmasters are not stupid. They know that the people they may be sending to the poker room might generate hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees or rake and they have 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 simply for a month or possibly a year but for as long as you are a customer!

But then the leading players – people that generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you can find people paying $30,000+ per 30 days 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 didn’t want to give up any of their cut and so they threatened the poker rooms to keep quite about the amount of money they were making. But the smart players already knew. And several of them decided to create a brand new system.

What they said was, “Hey, I’ll become a webmaster too. And in the event the poker room is paying me 35% I’ll give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service.” Basically, if you do the math, the top level guys generating thirty thousand dollars a month in rake all of a sudden were obtaining 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 every other perks the site might have offered them for being such a great customer.

Now almost all people are reading this and assume that there is no way also they can generate $30,000 a month so it’s only profitable for the big guys. In reality, anybody can sign up at these sites. However big or small a player they’re.

And one does not need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes in order to make a respectable income from playing poker. For instance, if you play $1/$2 NL poker and will play four tables at a time (which is quite doable with some practice) and play 42 hours every week, you may make approximately seventy six thousand dollars annually just on rakeback. Even when you never won a penny at the tables you would be getting about seventy six thousand dollars a year back.

That’s not only a bad living for some people. And if you play higher stakes, more hours, more tables, or actually win money playing poker then your total annual take gets even larger.

Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer whom shall sack you your second sales drop. You’ve got the freedom to work when 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 could have to play either extremely high stakes or for a lot of hours that plenty of people would burn out. All as a result of rakeback, being a professional poker player is within the reach of nearly everybody.