Is rake too high in 1/2c cash?

[LevySystem]

So First of to my playstyle backround, so you get an idea why i was thinking that the cap is not what its hurting our winrate. This is to simply phrased but I will explain this later.
So I am usually playing Zoom poker on Stars for volume. I will enter the pool with 100bb and cash out as soon as I hit 150bb and than reenter. As you play regular tables I can see why you cant do that that easily because of tableselection. It would make no sense to you if you were sitting there with 5 whales because you couldnt reenter the same table and therefore would be missing a lot of EV. I also realize that there is value that i am missing here since the player pool makes plenty of mistakes even playing only 100bb deep, not speak of people that will stack off their 300bb with QQ for instance.

My main focus rn is to get better at game. Therefore the idea is to play a high volume of hands to understand and "neutralize" variance more. More Coolers, more boards i have seen = more experience. You start to undestand how people approach situations so you get an idea on how to exploit that behavior. Like: "Wait a second, i´ve been here before".
Zoom poker on Stars is probably one of the thoughest fields to beat but in order to get better you need a challange. If i manage to beat the game in Zoom, i should have the knowledge to beat essentially every cashgame and then can really start making money. Atleast that is the idea.

So in my playstyle the biggest pot I play would be for 300bb in a headsup pot, unless I just stacked someone of and happen to play a hand between the stackoff and the "Sit out after BB" but that is so rare that i think we can discard that for our discussion.

I am really trying to address your thoughts and didn't think I was talking past you at all. Please let me know what I ignored so I can address it. I believe that I understood and simply disagreed with your assessment that the cap isn't that important since it wont be hit that often. We don't HAVE to be super deep to hit the cap either. Your example is only a heads up pot. The more multi way the pot is the easier it is to hit the cap. But that is beside the point. Way before you get to even 2/3 of the cap you're getting crushed already. I thought I showed that already in examples but it seems to have been dismissed as the 4.5% being the only issue.

This has been wrong phrasing by me. I allways hit maximum cap. -> 4.5% of the pot.
Note that in Zoom (EU) people play somewhat ok ranges. Getting into multiway pots is far more rare since you dont have a lot of 40 Vpip guys that just flat every hand behind and want to see a flop. Since they can just fastfold. Also there is generally more preflopagression. This is way different from livegames here in germany and regular online tables, alltough my experience with them is limited to >NL5.

An Example:
HU rakecap = 20bb at 4.5%
HU pot for 200bb = 9bb rake at 4.5%
HU pot for 445bb = 20bb rake at 4.5%

So the Pot must be +445bb for me to pay less than 4.5%.

MW 3-4 players rakecap = 40bb at 4.5%
MW (3-4 players) pot for 300bb = 13.5bb rake at 4.5%
MW (3-4 players) pot for 889bb = 40.005bb rake at 4.5%

Pot must be +889bb for me to pay less than 4.5%

Therefore in order to surpase the cap in a 3-4 P MW pot I would need to play rougly 300bb deep vs players who also are 300bb deep to ever reach (surpase) the cap + we all must be Allin postflop. And this i can say never happens to me due to my gameselction.

So in that sense the cap is to high for me to reach -> i dont hit it, and allways will pay 4.5% = max rake. This is why I think I have a hard time explaining this. We mean the same thing by saying we allways pay the maximum amount. The rakecap is "to high".

I initially believed that the cap may be more important than the percentage but I suppose they are fairly equal. I've also been using data to show why I think that way so I'll continue down that path. I had never heard of sites charging 1% rake before today so that moves the needle some in my opinion. Bottom line though, both cap and rate both matter a lot. You cannot discount either.

I'll go back to my 6.5k sample of 2NL hands at 5% rake with 15 BB cap for comparison. I exported all the hands and ran some calculations in excel.
I payed 6540 BB in rake under the 4.5% with a 15 BB cap.
Here's how that compares to other rates and caps if I use the same 6.5k hand sample, no flop no drop.
4.5% rate 0.5 BB cap = 1848 BB
1.0% rate 15 BB cap = 2424 BB
This already shows that the industry low BB cap saves more rake than the industry low percentage. So you can't just say "it's the 4.5%, the cap doesn't matter". They both matter. That is not me talking past you.

Here are some other scenarios for fun
4.5% rate 2 BB cap = 3773 BB
4.5% rate 5 BB cap = 5349 BB
4.5% rate 10 BB cap = 6393 BB
4.5% rate 20 BB cap = 6580 BB
2.5% rate 20 BB cap = 4083 BB
3.5% rate 20 BB cap = 5314 BB

I mean yeah, we can both agree that those samples are not really meaningfull but i understand were you come from. In your Example are you assuming that you will allways pay 15bb on every pot? or are you changing the variable of rake in % and Rakecap for each pot?

Because I would assume the number of pot you played bigger than the maximum amount of rake are quite low. A cap of 2bb would essentially mean 2% rake on 100bb, 1% at 200bb and so on. Therefore even if rake was 10% and cap would be 5bb we would only pay 5% of 100bb -> therefore the effective rake on 200bb pot fe would be 2.5%.

So just saying the cap/ rake doesnt matter at all is just wrong by itself. But its the corralation of the two. So in order to reduce rake i still stand by my points of playing tighter and deeper. These are the only variables we can change in order to pay less rake.

 

[c0rnBr34d]

So First of to my playstyle backround, so you get an idea why i was thinking that the cap is not what its hurting our winrate. This is to simply phrased but I will explain this later.
So I am usually playing Zoom poker on Stars for volume. I will enter the pool with 100bb and cash out as soon as I hit 150bb and than reenter. As you play regular tables I can see why you cant do that that easily because of tableselection. It would make no sense to you if you were sitting there with 5 whales because you couldnt reenter the same table and therefore would be missing a lot of EV. I also realize that there is value that i am missing here since the player pool makes plenty of mistakes even playing only 100bb deep, not speak of people that will stack off their 300bb with QQ for instance.

My main focus rn is to get better at game. Therefore the idea is to play a high volume of hands to understand and "neutralize" variance more. More Coolers, more boards i have seen = more experience. You start to undestand how people approach situations so you get an idea on how to exploit that behavior. Like: "Wait a second, i´ve been here before".
Zoom poker on Stars is probably one of the thoughest fields to beat but in order to get better you need a challange. If i manage to beat the game in Zoom, i should have the knowledge to beat essentially every cashgame and then can really start making money. Atleast that is the idea.

So in my playstyle the biggest pot I play would be for 300bb in a headsup pot, unless I just stacked someone of and happen to play a hand between the stackoff and the "Sit out after BB" but that is so rare that i think we can discard that for our discussion.

None of this is relevant to our conversation. This is a tangent conversation about how the game type (zoom vs normal) and play style may effect how much rake you pay. The question from OP was basically "I'm having troulbe at 2NL, the rake % seems high, what do you think?". Maybe you are trying to justify other points by adding this other info but it's not relevant.

This has been wrong phrasing by me. I allways hit maximum cap. -> 4.5% of the pot.
Note that in Zoom (EU) people play somewhat ok ranges. Getting into multiway pots is far more rare since you dont have a lot of 40 Vpip guys that just flat every hand behind and want to see a flop. Since they can just fastfold. Also there is generally more preflopagression. This is way different from livegames here in germany and regular online tables, alltough my experience with them is limited to >NL5.

An Example:
HU rakecap = 20bb at 4.5%
HU pot for 200bb = 9bb rake at 4.5%
HU pot for 445bb = 20bb rake at 4.5%

So the Pot must be +445bb for me to pay less than 4.5%.

MW 3-4 players rakecap = 40bb at 4.5%
MW (3-4 players) pot for 300bb = 13.5bb rake at 4.5%
MW (3-4 players) pot for 889bb = 40.005bb rake at 4.5%

Pot must be +889bb for me to pay less than 4.5%

Therefore in order to surpase the cap in a 3-4 P MW pot I would need to play rougly 300bb deep vs players who also are 300bb deep to ever reach (surpase) the cap + we all must be Allin postflop. And this i can say never happens to me due to my gameselction.

So in that sense the cap is to high for me to reach -> i dont hit it, and allways will pay 4.5% = max rake. This is why I think I have a hard time explaining this. We mean the same thing by saying we allways pay the maximum amount. The rakecap is "to high".

I suspect much of our problem is that English is not your first language. I'm not going to keep going in circles on this. First you say you're always hitting the rake cap "I allways hit maximum cap. -> 4.5% of the pot.". Then you go on to explain how hard it is to hit the rake cap and that in your player pool and with your play style it will never be reached. Both cannot be true. Also, as mentioned before. Your specific player pool and play style are not relevant to the question here. We are talking generally about 2NL rake. Most 2NL player pools have plenty of fish who will limp/call. Even if yours somehow doesn't, it doesn't change the rake structure. I give up on explaining how as soon as you pass a 0.5 BB rake cap you are already paying TONs more rake at 2NL than you are at higher limits. You keep giving max rake examples but the max rake case in only one out of many cases. You can be getting killed on the rake while never even reaching half of the max rake cap. That is a point that seems to be missed here. This holds true whether the rake is 4.5% or 3%. You're going to be paying a lot more rake as EITHER of these factors (cap or percentage) increase. The effective percentage rake paid is not as meaningful as the total amount of rake paid averaged over BB/Hand. If you tell me the percentage or cap without telling me the other it's hard to say if the structure is good or not unless one of them is insanely low like 1% rake or 0.5 BB cap.

I mean yeah, we can both agree that those samples are not really meaningfull but i understand were you come from. In your Example are you assuming that you will allways pay 15bb on every pot? or are you changing the variable of rake in % and Rakecap for each pot?

Because I would assume the number of pot you played bigger than the maximum amount of rake are quite low. A cap of 2bb would essentially mean 2% rake on 100bb, 1% at 200bb and so on. Therefore even if rake was 10% and cap would be 5bb we would only pay 5% of 100bb -> therefore the effective rake on 200bb pot fe would be 2.5%.

So just saying the cap/ rake doesnt matter at all is just wrong by itself. But its the corralation of the two. So in order to reduce rake i still stand by my points of playing tighter and deeper. These are the only variables we can change in order to pay less rake.

No, in my example the rake is calculated similar to the way the site would do it for every hand in the sample and the numbers are added up. If there is no flop there is no rake. If there is a flop the rake is whatever the specified percentage is (rounded up to one penny if it is lower). The max rake is only reached if the pot is large enough to meet the cap. In this sample there were 2 pots over 620BB. Both were 3 way pots that would have exceeded a 25 BB cap. I've already noted how many times the max rake was hit in the sample. 16 times the max rake of 15 BB was removed from the pot. This averages out to about once every 400 hands. So it is rare but not impossible. 2864 of these hands had zero rake taken. But when there was post flop action the rake was aggressive. That's the who point of this thread. It's not about how many times you pay max rake, it's about how much total rake you pay per hand on average. And in my experience, I payed 3 times more rake per hand at 2NL with a 4.5% / 15 BB cap structure than I did at 100NL with a 5% / 3 BB cap structure. That is to say that even though the percentage went up, the cap going down saved me a LOT of BBs. I don't really care how many times I hit the cap. I care how much total rake I'm paying every 1000 hands on average.

 

[LevySystem]

None of this is relevant to our conversation. This is a tangent conversation about how the game type (zoom vs normal) and play style may effect how much rake you pay. The question from OP was basically "I'm having troulbe at 2NL, the rake % seems high, what do you think?". Maybe you are trying to justify other points by adding this other info but it's not relevant.



I suspect much of our problem is that English is not your first language. I'm not going to keep going in circles on this. First you say you're always hitting the rake cap "I allways hit maximum cap. -> 4.5% of the pot.". Then you go on to explain how hard it is to hit the rake cap and that in your player pool and with your play style it will never be reached. Both cannot be true. Also, as mentioned before. Your specific player pool and play style are not relevant to the question here. We are talking generally about 2NL rake. Most 2NL player pools have plenty of fish who will limp/call. Even if yours somehow doesn't, it doesn't change the rake structure. I give up on explaining how as soon as you pass a 0.5 BB rake cap you are already paying TONs more rake at 2NL than you are at higher limits. You keep giving max rake examples but the max rake case in only one out of many cases. You can be getting killed on the rake while never even reaching half of the max rake cap. That is a point that seems to be missed here. This holds true whether the rake is 4.5% or 3%. You're going to be paying a lot more rake as EITHER of these factors (cap or percentage) increase. The effective percentage rake paid is not as meaningful as the total amount of rake paid averaged over BB/Hand. If you tell me the percentage or cap without telling me the other it's hard to say if the structure is good or not unless one of them is insanely low like 1% rake or 0.5 BB cap.


No, in my example the rake is calculated similar to the way the site would do it for every hand in the sample and the numbers are added up. If there is no flop there is no rake. If there is a flop the rake is whatever the specified percentage is (rounded up to one penny if it is lower). The max rake is only reached if the pot is large enough to meet the cap. In this sample there were 2 pots over 620BB. Both were 3 way pots that would have exceeded a 25 BB cap. I've already noted how many times the max rake was hit in the sample. 16 times the max rake of 15 BB was removed from the pot. This averages out to about once every 400 hands. So it is rare but not impossible. 2864 of these hands had zero rake taken. But when there was post flop action the rake was aggressive. That's the who point of this thread. It's not about how many times you pay max rake, it's about how much total rake you pay per hand on average. And in my experience, I payed 3 times more rake per hand at 2NL with a 4.5% / 15 BB cap structure than I did at 100NL with a 5% / 3 BB cap structure. That is to say that even though the percentage went up, the cap going down saved me a LOT of BBs. I don't really care how many times I hit the cap. I care how much total rake I'm paying every 1000 hands on average.

Well given that you had a hard time understanding what I am trying to say I felt the need to explain this further. Pretty sure this is more about language than anything else.

 

[zwbb]

I find it difficult to win at 1/2c cash tables.
I notice that the netto rake % is very high because you almost never hit the rake limit.

what do you think?

Online rake often depends on the limit played. Usually in cash games, rake has a certain threshold called a cap. For example, for every $ 0.20 in the bank, a room can hold $ 0.01 with a maximum rake (cap) of $ 0.20.

 

[_xgeb_]

It is definitely high, but with the amount of fish you will find, it is profitable in the long term. :dancing:

 

[ntf1125]

No.
It´s high from $10-$20 .

 

[1nsomn1a]

With all due respect, I think you better learn the secrets and many profitable poker actions as soon as possible, improve your skill and start growing at the limits as soon as possible, so as not to think about a high rake and enjoy the game and good earnings at higher limits. Good luck!

 

[antonis32123]

I havent noticed sth like this on zoom 2nl , rake was not my problem , never on this stake But rake and rakeback on pokerstars it is nowadays on its tourneys , lol

 

[poliaris747]

If the format of the game is suitable for your tactics, and you play in +? what, what difference does it make if there's a rake or not?