Rake Calculator

How this works

We ran each game structure through RocketSolver at the stack depth it is normally played at, testing many combinations of rake percentage and cap. Rake is money that leaves the table, so if you add up what every seat wins and loses, whatever has gone missing is what the house took. Divide that by the number of seats and you have what the average player pays. We then worked out a formula that matches those results, which lets the calculator handle structures we never ran.

Rake does not climb in a straight line as you raise the percentage or the cap. At 5% with a 0.20bb cap, the cap is reached once the pot hits 4bb, so beyond that point moving the rake to 6% changes nothing, because the house is already taking the most it can. Players also change how they play. When the rake is low they can afford to enter more pots, and those extra pots give back part of what the lower percentage saved them. The formula follows both effects.

The number covers the average seat and assumes everyone at the table plays close to perfectly at the depth we solved. A loose player pays more than the table average and a tight player pays less, so use this to compare one structure against another rather than to predict what your own database will show.

Finding your rake and cap

Open the Don't know your rake? lookup above, then choose your site, game, stakes and players dealt. It will fill in the published rake percentage and cap for you.

If your site or game is not listed, use its published rake table and enter the values manually. Select $ when the cap is quoted in money, and use the cap for the number of players dealt into the hand. Rake structures can change, so always confirm the values against the site's latest published table.

What the number leaves out

This is what the house takes, before anything it gives back. It does not account for:

• Rakeback
• Bonuses
• Leaderboards and promotions
• Jackpot and cash-drop deductions

Some sites deduct extra money from pots to fund player payouts, including GGPoker's Bad Beat Jackpot and Rush & Cash pool, and CoinPoker's Splash Pots. The calculator leaves these deductions out because they cannot be estimated from the published rake percentage and cap, and the collected money is paid back to players. This is the main reason the calculator may show less rake than your database or tracker on those sites: a tracker can count the deduction as rake while recording the payout separately. Across the player pool, these programs are approximately EV-neutral.

To find what you actually pay, work out what your rewards are worth in bb/100 and subtract them. If the calculator says 5.0 and your rewards come to 1.2 bb/100, you are paying 3.8. That figure is the one that decides whether a game is worth sitting in, and Where Your Win Rate Comes From works through how it combines with the players around you.

Arriving at that 1.2 is easier on some sites than others. Plenty of reward schemes are vague on purpose, with tiers you climb at an unpublished rate, points that convert at a ratio the site can move, and prizes that land unevenly across a month. When the terms will not give you a number, measure one instead: total what you were actually paid over a stretch you have already played and divide by the hands. An estimate drawn from your own history is worth more than a precise figure from a page written to be hard to pin down. If you can manage neither, treat the calculator as your worst case.

The formats

• Standard 6-Max. Six-handed, 100bb, no ante. The house rakes only pots that see a flop.
• Standard 9-Max. Nine-handed, 100bb, no ante. A nine-handed table pays slightly more rake in total than a six-handed one, but it splits across nine seats, so each player pays about 30% less.
• Standard HU. Heads-up, 125bb, no ante. Heads-up games generally use lower caps than 6-max, which offsets some of the extra rake from playing two-handed.
• GGPoker 6-Max. Six-handed, 100bb, no ante, but the house also rakes 3-bet-or-larger pots that end before the flop. At a 5% rake that comes to about 25% more than standard 6-max.
• CoinPoker 6-Max Ante. Six-handed, 100bb, and every player posts a 0.25bb ante. Like GGPoker, the house also rakes 3-bet-or-larger pots that end before the flop. At 5% with a 1.6bb cap it takes about 2.4 times as much as standard 6-max in bb/100, or about 20% more per starting pot.
• CoinPoker HU Ante. Heads-up, 125bb, and both players post a 0.25bb ante. The house also rakes 3-bet-or-larger pots that end before the flop.
• CoinPoker 6-Max Ante, before Oct 2026. The structure CoinPoker used until mid-October 2026. Six-handed, 100bb, and every player posts a 0.16bb ante. Only pots that see a flop are raked. The antes build bigger pots and pull more players into them, so it costs about 60% more than standard 6-max at the same rake.
• CoinPoker HU Ante, before Oct 2026. The structure CoinPoker used until mid-October 2026. Heads-up, 125bb, and both players post a 0.16bb ante. Only pots that see a flop are raked.
• WPT 8-Max Ante+Straddle. Eight-handed. Every player posts a 0.5bb ante, and one player posts a 2bb straddle. This puts 7.5bb in the pot before anyone acts. Players have 200bb stacks, equal to 100 straddles. Results are reported in original big blinds, which makes the rake look larger than it would in straddles.

Comparing rake across formats

Antes and straddles put more money in the pot before anyone acts. A standard table starts with 1.5bb, CoinPoker's 6-max ante game starts with 3bb, and WPTGold starts with 7.5bb: 4bb in antes, 1.5bb in blinds and a 2bb straddle. That extra dead money builds bigger pots, so these games take more rake in bb/100. It also gives you more to win, so bb/100 alone makes them look more expensive than they are.

That's why the calculator shows a second number under the result: the rake divided by the starting pot, given in starting pots per 100 hands. It tells you how much of the money in play the house takes, so use it when you compare formats. Between regulars at 5% with a 1.6bb cap, CoinPoker 6-max takes 10.2 bb/100 and standard 6-max takes 4.3. In starting pots per 100 hands the gap shrinks to 3.4 against 2.9, and what remains comes mostly from CoinPoker raking 3-bet pots before the flop.

This assumes win rates grow in step with the starting pot. That's roughly right, because the dead money is what everyone at the table is fighting over, but we haven't tested it, so treat the second number as a guide. Inside one format the two numbers rise and fall together, so bb/100 is all you need there. WPTGold results are often quoted in straddles, and you can divide its bb/100 by 2 to get straddles per 100 hands.

Table composition

A recreational player enters more pots and builds bigger ones, which lifts the table's average rake by about 20%. This setting rests on weaker evidence than the rest of the calculator: the all-regulars figure comes from the solver, while the 20% is a rule of thumb drawn from online hand databases and applied to the full-table formats. We leave heads-up at the solver estimate. Tables differ, so a tight recreational player moves the number by less than 20% and a very loose one moves it by more. The 20% is probably too high when the cap is small, because once a pot has hit the cap the house cannot take any more from it however big it grows.

What we tested

The standard and GGPoker 100bb formats were solved at rake percentages from 2% to 6%, with caps from 0.06bb up to 16bb. Standard heads-up was solved at 125bb from 2% to 6%, with caps from 0.03bb to 12bb. WPTGold was solved with 200bb stacks and a 2bb straddle, so each player had 100 straddles. The results are reported in original big blinds. We tested rake from 2% to 5%, with caps from 0.2bb up to 8bb.

CoinPoker changed its structure in mid-October 2026, raising the ante from 0.16bb to 0.25bb and raking 3-bet pots before the flop, so we solved both of its formats again. The 6-max curve covers 3% to 6% with caps from 0.6bb to 16bb. The heads-up curve covers 3% to 6% at 125bb, with caps from 0.48bb to 12bb. At 5% with a 1.6bb cap, the new 6-max structure takes 1.45 times what the old one did. We kept the old structure in the calculator: pick a CoinPoker format, then choose Before Oct 2026 under the game structure to compare the two.

Below a 0.6bb cap the CoinPoker 6-max curve reads too high. When the cap is that small, almost every raked pot pays the full cap, so the house can take at most the cap on each hand. With a big ante and preflop rake, this game comes close to that limit, and the formula can't bend sharply enough to follow it.

Raising the cap keeps costing you long after it looks like it should stop. In standard 6-max at 5%, moving from a 4bb cap to a 16bb one costs a full big blind per 100 hands.

If a site quotes its cap in dollars, divide by the big blind, so a $3 cap at $2/$5 comes to 0.6bb. The $ toggle above does this for you.

For the full-table formats, the formula sits within 0.03 to 0.06 bb/100 of the solver on average, and its worst miss is 0.17. Both heads-up curves miss by about 0.12 bb/100 on average. These figures show how closely the formula tracks the solver, not how closely either one tracks your own results.

The formula

If you want to check the work, this is the whole model:

R is the rake per player in bb/100, p is the rake percentage and C is the cap in big blinds. K, H, S and B are chosen for each format to match the solver results, and they all share the 0.56 exponent.