First step to play in Poker texas holdem is to get to know all the rules in the game. You should also get to know a poker words – language of game and words, which are connection with place where we play – with poker room. One of basic concept in poker is Rake (and rakeback) – it is commission. This is a fee, that all cash and tournament players need to pay. In cash game it is generally 5% of pot, but maximum 3-5$ in one hand. In tournaments rake costs usually 10% of buy-in (when you see „Buy-in 1$+0.10$” that means that 1$ is net buyin and there is 0.10$ of rake). You pay for total prize pool and fee for poker room. Rake is the way to poker room to make money and to cover administrative costs (e.g to pay for server and payrolls). It is absolutely understandable – without any subscription fee and a without lot of advertising they need to make money in some way. If you want to read more about this system and fees, visit our poker fun forum.

All of well known poker rooms, eg. Partypoker, poker770, titan poker offers their players freerolls. This is one of the ways to make their offer more attractive for players and as you know, player = income. What is freeroll tournament? This is a tournament, which you can play for free. Most important is that you can win a lot of real money in freerolls. “Here I found poker guide with list of poker rooms, which offers freerols – one of our user wrote to me. A lot of players visit everyday their favorite poker rooms and some of them win a lot of money. If we could put together all of this prizes, it would be a huge amount of money. How do this poker rooms make profit? When we put together all of poker company expenses (Welcome bonuses, tournaments with added prizes and shops, when we can buy various gadgets paying by points that have been added during the game) it is big amount. Added to this maintenance of servers (which are powerful machine, check specification of one of them, for example at Paradise poker) and there is good question – where from they are taking money for the maintenance? Well, contrary to appearances advertisements are not the biggest source of income. It`s all about commission that poker texas players pay for game – rake. It seems it`s not too much, but if you add rake from thousands of tables for every minute, you will see a huge amount of money. Situation of tournaments is exactly the same. For example – every day is one tournament with $10 buyin, $1 rake and 30.000 players are in. Only in this way we receive $30.000.

Like I said there is something like rakeback, which is partial refound of commission, that poker rooms are charge for playing on cash table and in tournaments. There also exist coupons and bonus codes, which makes that our rakeback is bigger and we can get some money even if we loose our game. By looking at statistics and so-called „rakeback tables” you can choose a poker rooms with most profitable rakeback. One from most important is definitely Party Poker – if we have special bonus code, we can increase our rakeback to 30%! The result is that we have refound 30% of commission for play, irrespective of we win or loose our rake hand. All of this facts causes, that we have players called sharks. Sharks are poker players which are make a lot of money from rakeback and they are able to earn a few hundred dollars by rakeback at every months. Differently matter is with poker rooms, where rakeback is not profitable. For those kind of poker texas hold-em rooms rakeback is only excuses to take from player a lot of money. They gave you some refound of your rake, but it is so small that you won`t notice it. And don’t forget also that with rake poker rooms can make promotions such as poker deposit bonuses

When you start playing poker, you must be conscious that poker game is composed of three independent levels. First is game for play money, second is game for real money on cash table and third are tournaments. Tournament is series of games with few hundreds/thousands of players. There are from few to several dozen of paid places in every tournament. Some part of prizes is sponsored by poker room and the rest come from buyins paid by players. Tournaments usually takes a few or even dozen hours (the longer, the higher buyin is). Pretty interesting are so-called freerolls – free poker tournaments that everybody can play. This tournaments are in full sponsored by poker room and are made to encourage players for the further game. For example in Party Poker $250 Freeroll is playing over 11 thousands of players, pot is $250, there are 1100 paid places and for 1^st place you can get $39,50. It is worth to mention that Paradise Poker is pioneer in promoting freerolls – those $250 tournaments you can play everyday. There are also satellites – in those tournament prizes are tickets to the tournaments with bigger buyin and bigger pize pool. And also in Paradise poker we can play special 1 vs 1, poker heads-up tournaments.

In previous article we got to know what is rake – one of basic concept in poker world. Remember – rake is commission that we pay for playing in cash games and in tournaments. We should be conscious of „rakeback” – refound part of rake. When we talk about rakeback, there must be rake hand – dealt hand which from poker room take the rake. Rake hand must discharge some conditions – properly high pot and flop on the board. There is a lot of websites that offers special codes to get bigger rakeback and save some of our money. It is worth to mention that in some of poker rooms rakeback is most profitable, in the others less or even non-profitable. You should know something about VIP Accounts – in poker rooms (such as Paradise poker) they offers a few conveniences, but it`s not affect for quality of game. It is for example: no advertisements, access to shop with gadgets or bigger rakeback for VIP players. Why only VIP players doesn’t have advertisements? Because adverts is a simpliest way to make money, and with that poker rooms can not only exist but they can make many interesting promotions like Sign up poker bonus.