The Real Table Rake Problem

Let's pretend time again. Let's pretend that BP is an exceedingly wealthy futher mucker that has a penchant for what most people would consider odd games. He/she fills up multiple tables with thousands of chips just waiting for someone to make the mistake of playing the same tables he's at.

And someone bites. And wow it's 5 card triple draw, one of the oddest of the odd. There's tens of thousands of chips out there in this heads up contest of titans.

And that's a problem. There's a lot of empty seats out there, and it sure seems unlikely that two people would sit, much less fill up the whole table. Why doesn't PokerStars just offer heads up or maybe a four player table?

But the real point is the rake. Or lack thereof for all practical purposes. Since we are pretending that PokerStars main source of income is not the cheating of real people out of their hard earned money, then like a brick and mortar the money made to pay the staff, pay the rent or mortgage, pay the utilities, pizza parties for staff birthdays, insurance, electrical repairs, pest control, licensing fees....need I go on? The way these non-cheaters pay is the rake.

Wiki tells us that the normal rake is 5-10% of every pot. And here we have a rake on $14,000 of real money bets that gets them a rake of just - $2 -.

Now if this one some sort of private game that two Nigerian princes sat at it would have been a simple matter to block me from even seeing it. This doesn't explain why one would join so many tables just waiting for an opponent.

And if these guys have 50k real money to put down for their private game they can afford to pay a real rake bigger than -

less than 1.5 THOUSANDTHS OF A PERCENT. That's more than 300 times the rake percent for a brick and mortar