Club poker rake is the fee a private club takes from every pot on apps like ClubGG, PokerBROS and PPPoker. This guide publishes the real rake charts of the seven clubs on our directory, compares them at every stake from 0.25/0.50 to 5/10, shows how much each one takes from a small pot and a big one, and covers the costs no rake chart shows: preflop rake, jackpot drops, all-in insurance, rakeback and cashout fees.
Poker clubs on ClubGG, PokerBROS and PPPoker take 5% to 8% of each pot, up to a cap set in big blinds. At 1/2 that cap runs from 3bb to 6bb, and the cap, not the percentage, decides what a regular pays over a month.
One finding before the details. Only one of the seven clubs charges 5%, and it is not the cheapest place to play a big pot. At 1/2, the club charging 8% takes less from a 100bb pot than the club charging 5%, and the cheapest big-pot table of the lot runs at 7%. That is why the number on every club promo tells you so little on its own.
How club poker rake works: percentage and cap
Club rake is set by the club and its union, not by the app. The app supplies the tables and the cards; the club decides what the house takes. Every rake chart comes down to two numbers: a percentage taken from each pot, and a cap, the most that can come out of any single pot, quoted in big blinds. The unions call it a fee, a tip or rake depending on who printed the chart. It is the same thing. All seven clubs below are listed on GlobalPokerSites.com's verified poker club directory.
Divide the cap by the percentage and you get the pot size where the cap starts to bite. At Loose Kings, 3bb divided by 7% is about 43bb, so every chip that goes into a 1/2 pot beyond 43bb is raked at nothing. At LC Orion, 5bb divided by 5% is 100bb, so the full 5% keeps running until the pot is a hundred big blinds deep. That one division explains most of what follows.
Club rake at 1/2: seven clubs compared
1/2 is the busiest stake in American club poker, so it is the fairest place to line the clubs up. The bar shows the most rake one pot can cost you.
No-limit hold'em cash tables at 1/2. Schedules as posted by each club and union, current on 2 November 2026. Cap-hit pot = cap divided by percentage, rounded.
Read the bars as the price of a big pot: Loose Kings tops out at 3bb, Loose Beats at 4bb, Loose Times at 4.5bb, Massiv Cannon, the PokerBROS Loose Cannon and LC Orion at 5bb, and the PPPoker Loose Cannon at 6bb. Read the pills as the price of a small pot, where the order almost flips: LC Orion's 5% is the lightest touch and Loose Times' 8% the heaviest.
Rake by pot size: why 8% can be cheaper than 5%
Put both numbers to work on real pot sizes and the headline percentage stops meaning much. The ladder runs four pots through every 1/2 schedule.
Rake = percentage x pot, stopped at the cap. Example: Loose Times at 8% takes 0.08 x 50 = 4bb from a 50bb pot, then stops at 4.5bb however big the pot grows.
Follow LC Orion and Loose Times across the rows. In a 50bb pot, Orion takes 2.5bb (5% of 50) and Loose Times takes 4bb (8% of 50). In a 100bb pot, Loose Times has been capped at 4.5bb since the pot passed 56bb, while Orion keeps taking 5% up to its 5bb ceiling. Orion overtakes Loose Times at a 90bb pot (4.5 / 0.05 = 90): above that line the 8% club is cheaper, below it the 5% club is.
So the right club depends on how you win. Small-ball players who collect lots of modest pots get the most from a low percentage. Players whose profit comes from stacks going in, which at most club tables means the deep-stacked 1/2 and 2/4 regulars, should look at the cap first. Loose Kings' 3bb ceiling at 1/2 and 2/4 is the lowest of the seven, which is why a 7% club ends up as the cheapest big-pot table on the board.
Club rake charts for every stake: ClubGG, PokerBROS and PPPoker
Here is the full set side by side. Each club name links to its review page, with the club ID and join details.
Schedules as posted by each club and union, current on 2 November 2026. n/a = stake not offered (Loose Cannon on PokerBROS runs 0.20/0.40 and 0.30/0.60 instead, both capped at 8bb).
Games: Bomb pot and Squid Game tables use the same caps; 2.50/5 ante tables 2.5 to 3bb
Games: PLO 6.5% (6.5bb at 0.25/0.50 down to 2.5bb at 5/10), short deck 6%, all-in-or-fold 1bb cap, PLO6 Mex Sweat 4.5%
Games: The posted chart covers hold'em
Games: The posted chart covers hold'em
Games: Same schedule for PLO4, PLO5 and PLO6
Games: Same rates for PLO; 1/1 PLO double-board bomb pots 6% capped at 6bb; 6+ hold'em 5 to 6%; OFC 5% capped at 3 blinds
Games: Tournaments carry a 15% fee
Two patterns stand out. First, caps shrink as stakes rise: Loose Times goes from 6.6bb at 0.25/0.50 to 2bb at 5/10. Counted in chips the cap still grows, but as a share of the stack it falls hard, which is why, in rake terms, higher stakes are the cheaper games to beat. Second, the game matters. Massiv runs Omaha at 6.5% rather than 7% and caps all-in-or-fold at 1bb, while Loose Beats uses one schedule for hold'em and every Omaha variant.
For scale, live poker is far heavier. A PokerNews survey of Las Vegas rooms found most take about 10% up to a $5 cap, with jackpot drops often adding $2 a hand. At $1/$2 that is 3.5bb out of a 25bb pot; no club in the ladder takes more than 2bb from the same pot.
Rake as a share of your winnings
Every number above is a percentage of the whole pot, including the half you put in yourself. What you win is the other half, so rake bites about twice as hard as the chart suggests.
Take a 20bb heads-up pot at 7%, 10bb from each player. The rake is 1.4bb, so the winner profits 8.6bb instead of 10bb: 14% of the opponent's money. At Loose Times' 8% the same pot costs 1.6bb, or 16% of the win. Three-way pots dilute it: a 30bb pot at 8% pays 2.4bb out of the 20bb won, 12%. Only once the cap kicks in does the share fall away. A 200bb heads-up pot at Loose Kings pays 3bb out of 100bb won, 3%.
Ashley Adams made the same point about live poker in a 2018 PokerNews column on highly raked games: when a 10% room takes $6 from a $60 heads-up pot, "your winnings have been raked at 20 percent." The small heads-up pots are taxed hardest, and they are the pots you play most.
Preflop rake: no flop, no drop
None of the seven charts says whether a hand that ends before the flop is raked. Most card rooms follow the old rule known as no flop, no drop, but not every room does, as GTO Wizard's rake and rakeback guide (23 July 2024) points out. On a club table it is a setting, so check it.
It looks like loose change. A raise and two folds leaves a pot of about 3bb, and 7% of that is 0.21bb. But if 45 hands in every 100 end preflop at a six-max table, that is 9.45bb per 100 hands for the table, or about 1.6bb per 100 for each seat. For a player who wins 5bb/100, that is nearly a third of the profit. The test takes one session: steal the blinds a few times, then open the hand history. A rake line on a preflop-only hand means your table rakes preflop.
Jackpot drops: the rake the chart does not show
Bad beat jackpots are a club staple, and the apps let a club or union switch one on. On ClubGG, BBJ inclusion is one of the settings a union applies across its member clubs. The jackpot never appears on a rake chart, so ask your host: is it funded from the club's share of the rake, or taken from the pot on top?
The difference is real. Say a table takes an extra 1bb from every pot of 20bb or more, and about 25 pots in every 100 hands reach that size. The drop removes 25bb per 100 hands, or 4.2bb per 100 per seat, more than the gap between the highest and lowest 1/2 caps on the board. Every chip goes back to players eventually, but to whoever takes the qualifying bad beat, not to the regular grinding out a winrate. For a winning player, a drop paid on top of rake is rake with a raffle ticket stapled to it.
All-in insurance: the most expensive button in the app
All-in insurance has long been a fixture of the big private games in Asia, and it now sits in the menu on many club apps. You are all in and ahead, your opponent has a few outs, and for a premium you get paid if one lands. It is a side bet, and the price is the payout multiplier the app offers you. Check it against the fair payout: with both hands face up on the turn, 44 cards are unseen, so against 8 outs a fair bet pays 36 to 8, or 4.5 to 1. Anything less is the house's margin. Our pot odds and outs calculator counts outs for you.
Fair payout = cards that miss divided by outs. House edge on any offer = (misses minus outs x offered payout) / 44. Example: 3.5 to 1 against 8 outs gives (36 - 28) / 44 = 18.2%.
Now put a price on it. Say the app offers 3.5 to 1 against 8 outs, a typical-looking number. That is an 18.2% edge. You get 100bb in ahead, and insuring the full pot takes a premium of 28.6bb (100 / 3.5), so the click costs about 5.2bb on average (28.6 x 0.182), more than the 1/2 rake cap at six of our seven clubs. Running it twice, which most club apps offer, smooths the swings for free: as GTO Wizard's insurance explainer (8 July 2024) notes, it has no house edge at all.
Club rakeback: dealt vs contributed
Rakeback is the club handing part of your rake back, usually weekly, and it is where clubs compete hardest. Two clubs offering the same percentage can still pay different amounts, because the percentage applies to a figure they calculate. Jonathan Little's Pokercoaching guide to rake sets out the methods. Dealt rake splits each pot's rake evenly across everyone dealt in. Contributed rake credits only players who put money in, and the weighted contributed version, which Little calls the most common at major sites, credits each player in proportion to what they put in.
Run one hand through both. A six-max pot of 30bb at 6% pays 1.8bb in rake. If you folded preflop, dealt rake credits you 0.3bb (1.8 / 6) and weighted contributed credits you nothing. If you and one opponent built the pot with 15bb each, dealt still credits you 0.3bb while weighted contributed credits you 0.9bb. Tight players do better under dealt; action players and big-pot players do better under contributed.
Where club rake goes: agents, unions and apps
Rake is never one person's money. The club collects it, agents take a cut of the rake from the players they bring in, and above the club sits the union, which is why every chart above carries a union name. ClubGG's explainer on unions (22 October 2026) defines one as a group of clubs operating under a shared set of rules, tools and admin processes, with each club in only one union at a time. For players the point is traffic: a club with a couple of hundred regulars can sit inside a union running far more tables than it could fill alone.
Pooled traffic costs money. ClubGG's union back office page sells it as a monthly subscription priced by the number of affiliated clubs, a running cost the union carries before a single hand is dealt. It is the online version of a card room paying for dealers, a floor and the lights, and it is why rates cluster between 5% and 8%: one pot pays the agent, the club, the union and the software.
Cashout fees and chip rates
Chips are bought and sold through your club, not the app; the mechanics are in our guide to poker app agents. The price comes in two forms: the rate, meaning what a chip is worth going in and coming out (any gap is a fee in disguise), and a straight cashout fee.
A cashout fee hurts the casual player far more than the grinder. Say a club charges 2%. A regular who plays 2,000 hands a week at 0.50/1, wins 5bb/100 and cashes out the 100-chip profit pays 2 chips, or 0.1bb per 100 hands. A recreational player who plays 300 hands and cashes out 250 chips pays 5 chips, or 1.7bb per 100. Same fee, seventeen times the bite.
How to read your club's rake chart
Find your stake. Divide the cap by the percentage to get the pot where the cap kicks in. If most of your profit comes from stacks going in, the lower that number the better; if you win lots of small pots, look at the percentage instead. Then ask the four questions the chart cannot answer: does the table rake pots that end preflop, is the jackpot taken on top of the rake, is rakeback dealt or contributed, and what does a chip cost going out compared with going in. A good host answers all four in one message. The 5% on the promo was never the whole story. Now you have the rest of it.
Low cap for big-pot grinders, low percentage for small-ball players: all seven clubs are on our directory with their club IDs, unions and join links. We played in and cashed out of every one before listing it, and several run private rakeback deals for our readers.
Browse verified poker clubsSources: club rake charts as posted by the TMT, Massiv, Paradise, Stars & Stripes, Good Beats, PrimeTime NUTS and Orion unions, current on 2 November 2026; PokerNews, Las Vegas rake survey; PokerNews, Ashley Adams; GTO Wizard on rake; GTO Wizard on insurance; Pokercoaching; ClubGG on unions; ClubGG union back office. Preflop, jackpot and cashout examples are illustrative. 18+. Check the rules where you live, set a budget before the first hand and only play with money you can afford to lose.
