How Do Online Poker Websites Earn Money
Whether you play low stakes cash games or tournaments there is a ton of opportunity to make serious money. Even the average lower limit players can make $30,000 per year without much trouble. The time and effort you put in will determine how far your poker bankroll will grow. The more effort you put in the more you get out of it. On average for cash game players at 50nl-1,000nl, you can see steady amounts piling in per month both from rakeback as well as from profit.
Most low to middle limit cash game players will make about $1,000 per month just in rakeback. That is around $12,000 per year extra that you get just for playing poker. Live poker players don’t see this extra money each month and it is a reason why online poker is much better than live poker. Online poker lobbies are where you find which poker games an online poker site offers. Most online poker sites offer a quick start option, which is useful for new players. You just type in the game you want to play, the stakes you want to play, how many players you want to play against and then click play. The rake is determined by the poker site and usually pegged at 5%. If say the pot is $1 and the rake percentage is set at 5%, 5 cent goes to the table while 95 cent goes to the player. The hands played on online poker sites can run from 55 up to 77 hands dealt in an hour. How much Rake/Fees you pay at each online poker site in 2020. As you may know, all online poker sites earn their money by rake/fees. At each tournament or cash game pot, a small percentage of the pot is withheld from the poker room, which can also be understood as a service fee to use the operator’s platform.
Most low to middle limit cash game players will make about $1,000 per month just in rakeback. That is around $12,000 per year extra that you get just for playing poker. Live poker players don’t see this extra money each month and it is a reason why online poker is much better than live poker. The opportunity for growth is better and you can simply make more money online than you can live. Even if you have a lower win rate playing cash games, $30,000 per year is very feasible and you should often times exceed that by a nice margin. Here is where you also come up with your strategy for beating bad poker players.
Low to Middle Stakes Tournament Players
Most low to middle stakes tournament players will put in 50 hours or more per week and some weeks not show profit at all. The reason for that is because of the natural amount of variance in poker tournaments. You could easily go 100 tournaments without a big score or more. Tournament players often make their money from big tournament wins. Even if there are only 15-20 big tournament wins per year that could easily exceed $100,000 or more. Tournaments are very hard and take a lot more patience than cash games. Playing low and middle stakes tournaments will turn out to be a good thing in the end. You can crush these games because this is where tons of fish are in the online game. The lower buy-ins attracts bad players, and you can capitalize on this by learning how to progress through tournaments and beat the weak online poker players.
Low to Middle Stakes Sit and Go Players
The sit and go players are overlooked online, but they are there. Heads up sit and goes are one of if not the most profitable game online today. The whole key to learning heads up sit and goes is practice. You have to know the correct play and since you are playing almost every hand, you have to know when to give up and when to push forward. Heads up matches are often won or lost by losing a coin flip, but up to that point you should have been able to build a chip lead, so it isn’t really what it seems. These matches can be grueling if you don’t find the fish.
Where to Start
To make money you should start off as low as the $10 level. Once you have had success there you can move up to the $20, then $33 and so on. These games will take you up as high as you let them. The range for what you can make per year will depend on how much mental stability you have as well as how well you can manage a bankroll. Some players will make $10,000 per year and some will make close to $200,000 per year. It depends on how much work you want to put in.
High Stakes Players
The high stakes players have no cap on what they can make per year because when sitting in the right game you can make a ton of money in a short period of time. When sitting in the wrong games you can lose a ton of money in a short period of time. Most high stakes cash game players can easily win with a definite level of consistency over a million dollars each year. The high stakes tournament players should also walk away with close to a million. For tournament players it more so depends on if they win the one big tournament or two for the year. You can lose a lot in tournaments over time if you don’t run well. High stakes sit and go players will win hundreds of thousands more or less over time with ease.
The reason these players have success is because when a player wins a big tournament (like the World Series of Poker), they will always jump into try and beat high limit players. This will always be the case and the natural reason why sit and go players and cash players make more than tournament players. Also, they have more of an edge than tournament players do to make consistent money over time.
ClubWPT Poker is one of the few real money poker sites that is allowed to operate from within the United States. What separates ClubWPT from other poker sites is that you are not allowed to make deposits at your whim. The poker site operates based on a subscription model. You sign up, pay $19.95 a month and play in tournaments that offer real money prizes.
One of the most common questions people ask is if you can real money at ClubWPT Poker. The short answer to that is yes. ClubWPT poker does offer free poker tournaments with real money cash prizes. There are also a variety of satellite tournaments in which you can win seats to major land-based World Poker Tour events. For example, they recently hosted a tournament that gave away free entry to the WPT Jacksonville tournament ($1,000,000 prize pool).
If you haven’t heard of the WPT before, the letters stand for the World Poker Tour. The WPT travels around the world and hosts live tournaments with major prize pools. If you win a seat to a WPT event, you’ll get to play for millions of dollars’ worth of prizes. For those of you that like videos, here’s a quick look at what a big hand looks like at the WPT:
The second-most common question is if you can win serious money at ClubWPT.com. This question isn’t answered as easily because the answer depends on what you consider serious money. ClubWPT hosts a $10,000 tournament every month with some pretty nice payouts. These payouts aren’t as big as what you would see at the PokerStars Sunday Million, but they are still nothing to sneeze at.
For example, here are the top ten prizes that you can win in the ClubWPT $10K Guarantee:
Place | Prize |
---|---|
1st | $1,000 |
2nd | $750 |
3rd | $500 |
4th | $450 |
5th | $400 |
6th | $350 |
7th | $300 |
8th | $250 |
9th | $200 |
10th | $150 |
Payouts go all the way down to 250th place. So in this tournament, the first place finisher gets $1000 while the last paid spot nets $20. When you compare these prizes to the cost of a ClubWPT membership, that’s not a bad deal.
Additionally, the satellite tournaments held at ClubWPT Poker can lead to massive prizes. If you win a seat at a major live tournament, you’ll have a real chance to win hundreds of thousands of dollars. All in all, it’s not a bad deal considering ClubWPT has both free membership options and a $20 a month option.
What I don’t like about ClubWPT is that the whole poker site feels very amateurish. The software is buggy, the website itself has issues and I have a hard time getting in touch with customer support. Unfortunately, ClubWPT doesn’t face much competition so they don’t have much incentive to keep things rolling.
How Do Online Poker Sites Make Money
How Do Online Poker Websites Earn Money Online
If you live in the US and are dying for a place to play poker, I would say that ClubWPT is worth a look. I personally still think Carbon Poker is the best option for USA players, but playing at offshore poker sites does have its own risks. If you live outside the US, my first pick is Bet365 Poker by a long shot.
One last thing to keep in mind is that ClubWPT Poker does not offer cash games. This is strictly a poker tournament site. As a US-based subscription poker site, ClubWPT Poker is not able to provide cash games.