phillysteve wrote:
And yes, I fully understand that in the "Big Game"...raking let's say $20 from a $100,000 pot may seem quite irrelevant...but let's do the math...and let's understand the realities of poker. No matter how good you are, sooner or later some stud comes along who is better than you and can clean you out, and chances are you won't even see it coming...and it doesn't matter how good you are because there are a number of circumstances which can affect your game. Age is obviously a circumstance, and other things as well such as continued use of amphetamines and other drugs to stay alert in long poker sessions such as multi-day tournaments. Trying to become a professional poker player truly is a poor career choice - many of them die at a much younger age than the general population and virtually all of them die dead broke.
Getting back to the math...let's take that $20 rake...Let's say a pro in the "Big Game" gets involved in 50 raked pots a day, five days a week...that's a cost of $5,000 a week, approximately $250,000 a year...over ten years this would be 2.5 million dollars...over a course of thirty years playing poker from say age 20 to 50, this would accumulate to 7.5 million dollars in rake - that's a lot of money even to a "Big Game" player. So let's say a "household name" player who has money and is now 50 years old, has gotten older and isn't quite as sharp as he used to be, and suddenly before he fully comprehends it, a guy across the poker table who he thought was a fish, now has his money and suddenly he is dead broke. Well, if he hadn't been playing in raked poker games, he would have had around 7.5 million dollars still in his possession, instead of in the gambling business owner's possession. With the accumulation of the rake, the numbers become staggering even for players in smaller pots, and it gets to a point with variance, and other points that I alluded to here, and there are other factors as well, whereby there is just too much luck involved with poker to overcome this enormous accumulation of rake money taken from a bankroll.
so if they're playing for $100,000 pots this would suggest they're playing at say $500/$1,000 blinds. So lets say there are two players playing heads up at these high stakes. You're saying that 250 raked pots would cost a player $5,000 in rake. I'm not entirely sure how many times players see the flop HU on average but lets say it's 50% of the time (probably less than that). So this would mean that they would get to play 500 hands and get charged $5,000 for doing so. This amount would be between them because i'm not sure what the cap is on rake but i'm fairly sure it isn't going to be more than $20 per hand. So lets say player A has an edge on player B. Player A needs to make more than $2,500 every 500 hands to beat the rake. So player A only needs to make more than half a big blind per 100 hands (not exactly a massive amount for a good player). Added onto this he would receive say 25% rakeback so would have $625 extra every 500 hands.
