I'm sure I'm not the first one to notice this but the rake in most major poker rooms is just insanely high, right? I grinded a month in Pokerstars NL10 tables, made around $200 and paid $400 in rake. Ok there's bonuses worth about 25%, but thats still like $300 paid just for the opportunity to play there. I mean, come on - I play MICROstakes, I have a bankroll of $300 and I pay $300 a month in service fees? I could lease a brand new car for that money. Where does that money go?
Poker rooms make pretty decent profit. I understand that in free market economy competition is supposed to deal with such issues and push the service fees down. Somehow it doesn't and all major poker rooms charge about the same rake, making nice net profit in the progress... Whats up with that?
Last but not least - I've found that there are several small poker rooms that offer far lower rake or far more generous rakeback than the big ones (Pay No Rake Poker and WSEX for example, I don't know if I'm allowed to post the brand names in this forum). Lets say you play at a small poker room offering 50% rakeback - that would be extra 100 bucks a month when we look at the the above NL10 example. Is it worth it? Has anybody had any experiences with that kind of poker rooms? Are they trustworthy? How about traffic and fishiness?
Thanks for you're thoughts, everybody.
