There's a dirty little secret going on within the online poker world that folks do not want you to learn about. Almost every professional player knows about this secret and they've found a way to cash in on it. So can you.

Lots of people are unaware that whenever you play online poker the poker room takes a small fee out of each pot. According to their rate structure it might be around 5% of the pot value. That fee is called "the rake."

But that is not the big secret. The big secret is that you can get a large percentage of that money back!

Online poker is a massively profitable business. Top poker sites turn over ranging from $1 million - $3 million a day. Their biggest cost is acquiring new customers. One of the ways they get new customers is to pay webmasters to put ad banners and links on their own sites to entice you to play on that specific poker site.

Although the webmasters aren't stupid. They know that individuals they are sending to the poker room might generate hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees or rake and they've shrewdly negotiated profit sharing deals with the poker sites. In many cases the webmasters are earning 35% or even more of the fees/rake you generate playing on the poker site. And not just for a month or possibly a year but for as long as you're a customer!

But then the leading players - folks who generate sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in rake each month (yes, you can find people paying $30,000+ per 30 days in rake every month) - started to wonder why these webmasters were making all of this money in the event the player was the one actually generating the rake.

The greedy webmasters did not want to quit any of their cut and so they threatened the poker rooms to keep quite about how much money they were making. But the smart players already knew. And lots of of them decided to generate a new system.

What they said was, "Hey, I'll become a webmaster too. And in the event the poker room is paying me 35% I will give 33% back to my players and keep only 2% for providing the service." Quite simply, in the event that you do the math, the top level guys generating $30,000 a month in rake all of a sudden were getting a windfall $9,900 a month back! That is over and above anything they might have won at the table, bonuses the site may have offered, or some other perks the site might have offered them for being such a good customer.

Now lots of people are reading this and assume that there is no way they can generate $30,000 a month so it's only profitable for the big guys. As a matter of fact, anybody can sign up at these sites. Regardless of how big or small a player they can be.

And one doesn't need to play at Phil Ivey nosebleed stakes as a way to make a respectable income from playing poker. As an example, if you play $1/$2 NL poker as well as can play four tables at a time (which can be very doable with some practice) and play 42 hours a week, you could make approximately seventy six thousand dollars per year just on rakeback. Even if you never won a penny at the tables you could be getting about $76,000 per year back.

That is not really a bad living for some people. And if you play higher stakes, more hours, more tables, or actually win money playing poker then your total annual take gets even larger.

Imagine no boss, no commute to the office, no grinding away for some employer which will sack you the other sales drop. You've got the freedom to work when you want and around you want.

But if you had to do it just on your winnings alone you might never get there. You would have to play either very high stakes or click here for more info a lot of hours that most individuals would burn out. All thanks to rakeback, being a professional poker player is in the reach of nearly everyone.