Consumer's Guide to Poker, PART 2 OF 3

Being a smart shopper applies to your poker room. It's up to you, the consumer to shop around and learn what you need to know to determine whether you're getting your money's worth. First, learn how the house gets its money. Some places have a rake - an amount that the house takes out of every pot. Other places charge time - an amount taken every half hour from each player. Find out, before you sit down, exactly which method is used and how they use it.

If the house takes a rake, what is the percentage of the pot they take? Most rooms take either 5% or 10% of the pot with some cap on the maximum they take. This rake can be a huge drain on your game as we've seen.

In a tight game, if the house takes 10% of every pot, they are taking almost 20% of your winnings when you win - since half of the pot tends to be your money in a game that generally turns heads up after the initial betting round. This is an almost insurmountable cut, making poker one of the worst bets in the casino. Even the slot machines don't take more than 10% of your winnings when you win. And the best bets on the crap table have only a 1% house take. Fortunately, most rakes (though not all as I found out in Denmark and in some private clubs) are also limited by a fixed dollar amount. They may be a 10% rake with a $4.00 or $5.00 maximum - or a 5% rake with a $3.00 or $4.00 maximum. In all but the smallest game it is the maximum that determines how large the rake really is - since most contested pots will have a pot where 10% or even 5% is larger than the maximum dollar amount. Take a 10%, $4 max rake game. If you're playing $5/10 stud, the pot will hit the max, usually, by Fourth Street. A typical pot, in a moderately loose game, probably reaches $100 much of the time. This means that the rake is actually only 4% ($4 out of $100 pot).

Make sure you know when the rake is taken out of the pot as well. All 10% $4 max raked games aren't alike. Some places rake the entire $4.00 out of the antes. Other places take $1 at $10, another at $20 but then they don't take the third until the pot is $120 and the fourth at $240. As you can see, that often ends up with a rake of considerably less than 2%. All other factors being equal, the latter game is much more beatable than the former game.

All things are rarely equal between games, however. For one thing, though the rake tends to be a much lower percentage of the pot as you move up in stakes, the games tend to be tougher because you're against tougher players. But that's not a function of how much the house is taking - it's just something else that you need to be aware of.

Paying time tends to be more straightforward than paying a rake. For one thing, it's much easier to figure out how much you're paying to play. The amount you pay doesn't depend on the type of game you're in, how tight or how loose you or your opponents are, or how many hands you're playing an hour. On the other hand, it does raise another consideration for you the educated consumer. How quick are the dealers.

Dealer speed determines hands/per hour. What you want in a timed game are many hands per hour - so you're per hand costs are relatively low. Imagine a game with a time charge of $5 for every half hour. If you had a poor, novice dealer who couldn't keep the action moving, made mistakes, and dealt very slowly you might only get 10 hands an hour in. That would mean you would be paying $1 per hand to the house. On the other hand, an experienced dealer who kept the action moving might get out 35 hands in an hour - lowering your cost to under $.29 per hand.