There are many poker strategy articles, which work great on theory, but when you put the rake into the equation, the win rate does not meet expectations.
Two games can have the same blinds and require very different preflop strategy.
A $1/$2 game charging 5% capped at $2 is not remotely the same game as $1/$2 charging 8% capped at $10. And 5% uncapped is another animal again.
The reason is simple: rake does not just reduce your win rate after you play. It changes whether marginal hands are profitable to enter with in the first place.
That is the useful way to understand how rake changes poker strategy.
Not “high rake is bad.”
The real question is:
At this exact percentage and cap, which parts of my strategy should change?
First, Ignore the Dollar Cap. Convert It to Big Blinds
A $10 cap means little until you know the stakes.
| Game | Rake | Dollar cap | Cap in BB |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1/$2 | 5% | $10 | 5 BB |
| $2/$5 | 5% | $10 | 2 BB |
| $5/$10 | 5% | $10 | 1 BB |
This is why the same rake sheet can produce very different games.
GTO Wizard publishes 100 BB cash solutions using 5% rake with a 4 BB cap at NL50 and only a 0.6 BB cap at NL500. In its BB-vs-LJ example, the big blind folds about 62% at NL50 but about 59% at NL500. Same 5% headline rate; lower relative cap allows more hands to continue.
That is our first hard example of how rake changes poker strategy.
1. No Pot Rake or a Fixed Time Charge
This is the easiest structure strategically.
If nothing is removed from individual pots, marginally profitable hands do not become losing simply because they reach the flop.
You can therefore play:
- wider big-blind defense
- more in-position calls
- more suited speculative hands
- more marginal opens
- more small positive-EV spots generally
Upswing’s rake discussion makes exactly this point: in games with no pot rake, including time-based seat-fee games, players can play considerably looser.
Practical adjustment
Do not use high-rake cash ranges in a rake-free game.
You are giving up profitable hands unnecessarily.
No pot rake means thin edges are allowed to stay thin edges.
2. Around 5% Rake, Cap Below 1 BB
This is a relatively forgiving pot-rake structure.
The percentage still matters in small pots, but once the cap is reached, additional money entering the pot no longer creates additional rake.
How to play
Stay relatively close to normal cash-game ranges.
You can retain more:
- BB calls
- suited connectors
- suited broadways
- in-position flats
- marginal continues
The GTO Wizard NL500 example is useful here: 5% with a 0.6 BB cap produces wider continuation than its 5%/4 BB-cap NL50 solution.
When learning how rake changes poker strategy, this is an important distinction:
5% itself is not necessarily the problem.
A large cap is often what makes 5% painful.
3. Around 5% With a 2–4 BB Cap
Now you should noticeably tighten.
Gary Blackwood and Upswing classify roughly 2–4 BB coming out of a pot as medium rake, while 4 BB+ becomes high rake. Blackwood’s first recommendation is simple:
“You want to play a tight aggressive style preflop.”
He specifically recommends tightening big-blind defense and using more 3-bets with hands that are close between calling and raising.
Where to tighten first
- Cold calls
Calling suffers badly because you are committing yourself to a postflop pot where rake will usually be collected.
- Big-blind defense
Do not defend merely because you are “getting a price.”
- Multiway overcalls
The extra players do not automatically make a weak hand profitable.
Gary Blackwood demonstrated this at 10NL by folding 87o in the BB after a 2.2 BB HJ raise and SB call. His analysis says even JTo was not a profitable call under that high-rake structure.
This is one of the most practical lessons in how rake changes poker strategy:
Calling is normally the first part of your range to lose hands.
4. 6–8% Rake With a Real Cap
Now we are outside most standard solver libraries, so I would not pretend there is one universal “8% range.”
But the direction is clear.
Suppose the structure is:
8% capped at 5 BB.
Before reaching the cap:
| Pot | Rake |
|---|---|
| 10 BB | 0.8 BB |
| 25 BB | 2 BB |
| 50 BB | 4 BB |
| 62.5 BB+ | 5 BB cap |
Compare that with 5% capped at 5 BB:
A 50 BB pot loses only 2.5 BB, rather than 4 BB.
That additional 1.5 BB has to come from somewhere.
It comes out of the EV of the players entering the pot.
How I would adjust
- cut weak cold calls harder
- tighten BB defense further
- reduce loose multiway participation
- lean toward 3-bet/fold rather than call with borderline hands
- value position more
- require a larger opponent-quality edge before entering marginal spots
Upswing’s Mike Brady describes the general mechanism well: calling actions suffer most as rake rises because a call makes reaching the flop — and paying rake — much more likely.
That is a much better way to think about how rake changes poker strategy than blindly removing 10% of every range.
5. 8–10% Rake With a 5 BB+ Cap
At this point I would stop calling rake a small detail.
Consider a 10% structure capped at 5 BB.
A 20 BB pot loses 2 BB.
A 40 BB pot loses 4 BB.
At 50 BB, the full 5 BB cap is reached.
Marginal pots become expensive very quickly.
Strategy becomes much more selective
I would prioritize:
- strong opens over loose opens
- 3-bets over questionable cold calls
- strong BB defenses over “maybe” defenses
- heads-up pots over weak multiway participation
- very good opponents to play against
The last one matters most.
A terrible player can make an expensive game worthwhile.
A 10%-rake game full of competent regulars may simply not be worth playing.
Doug Polk has repeatedly made the same broad adjustment in high-rake micro-stakes games: play tighter, reduce marginal calling and use aggression to win pots before rake is charged where the room uses no-flop-no-drop.
So how rake changes poker strategy eventually becomes a game-selection question too.
6. 5% Uncapped Rake
This deserves its own category.
There is no point where the rake stops growing.
At 5% uncapped:
| Final pot | Rake |
|---|---|
| 20 BB | 1 BB |
| 50 BB | 2.5 BB |
| 100 BB | 5 BB |
| 200 BB | 10 BB |
This changes something important.
In a capped game, once the cap has been reached, building a larger pot does not create more rake.
In an uncapped game, it keeps growing.
Jonathan Little is unusually direct on this:
“In games with an uncapped rake, you should play extremely tight!”
He adds that uncapped NLH — and especially PLO — can be difficult to beat unless the opponents are weak enough to create a very large edge.
How to play 5% uncapped
This is where I would make the biggest preflop cuts:
- very few marginal cold calls
- significantly tighter BB defense
- avoid weak suited hands justified only by implied odds
- stop treating large multiway pots as automatically attractive
- demand genuinely weak opposition
Understanding how rake changes poker strategy here means abandoning the idea that “the cap will save me in a big pot.”
There is no cap.
7. 8–10% Uncapped Rake
This is the structure where I would be most cautious.
At 8% uncapped:
- 50 BB pot → 4 BB rake
- 100 BB pot → 8 BB rake
- 200 BB pot → 16 BB rake
At 10% uncapped:
- 50 BB pot → 5 BB rake
- 100 BB pot → 10 BB rake
- 200 BB pot → 20 BB rake
Those are not solver estimates. They are simply the arithmetic of the stated rake structure.
And that arithmetic is brutal.
There is no reliable public evidence I found that supports saying something fake-precise like:
“Defend exactly 21.7% from the big blind at 10% uncapped.”
So I would not publish such a number.
What the established coaching evidence does support is the direction:
tighten hard, especially calls; favor selective aggression; and demand a very large player-pool edge.
Jonathan Little’s warning about uncapped rake applies directly here.
At some point how rake changes poker strategy has a surprising answer:
Sometimes the correct adjustment is not to play the game.
No Flop, No Drop Changes the Equation
There is another question you must ask:
Is rake charged when the hand ends preflop?
GTO Wizard compared two NL50 CO-vs-LJ structures. In its no-flop-no-drop example, CO raised 9% and called 1.4%. In its GGPoker example, where pots ending preflop can be raked, CO raised 8% and called 3.2%.
The structures were not otherwise identical — GTO Wizard explicitly notes differences in opening ranges and caps — so this is not a pure one-variable experiment.
But the incentive is real:
If winning preflop avoids rake, aggression becomes more valuable.
That should always be part of how rake changes poker strategy.
In Short, This is How Rake Changes Poker Strategy
| Structure | Best general adjustment |
|---|---|
| No pot rake | Play considerably wider |
| 5%, ≤1 BB cap | Normal ranges; more thin calls survive |
| 5%, 2–4 BB cap | Tighten calls and BB defense |
| 6–8%, 2–5 BB cap | Cut marginal calls harder |
| 8–10%, 5 BB+ cap | Very selective preflop play |
| 5% uncapped | Extremely tight around marginal participation |
| 8–10% uncapped | Only consider with a very large game-quality edge |
There is no magic rule saying 8% rake means play X% fewer hands.
Poker does not work that neatly.
But the evidence is remarkably consistent about how rake changes poker strategy:
Marginal calls die first.
As rake rises, tighten your BB defense, cold-call less, be more selective in multiway pots and give greater weight to aggression when winning preflop avoids rake.
Then look at the cap.
And if there is no cap, take that very seriously.
Because the final lesson in how rake changes poker strategy is not about memorizing a new chart.
It is knowing when the economics of the table have become so bad that finding another game is the strongest strategy you have.
If you love playing in private games, here is how the rake on poker apps looks. Would recommend also looking at which poker game formats can turn into rake traps. For people who ever played poker online in 2026, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about GGPoker own private game platform and here is how the rake structure changed on ClubGG.
For those of you who want lower rake than the industry standard of 5% and prefer the regular poker site feel, you can join QQPoker with rakeback deal.
