Rake

chesslw · Rake

Is it me or are the tournaments/sngs/husngs much much better to play than cash games? I've been playing a lot of rush lately and just noticed how much rake I have paid compared to playing husngs etc where a fixed rake is paid.

I'm sure some people have done some maths on this- but here's my thoughts (on fulltilt):

at the levels i play at (5nl 10nl), the rake for cash games is given by 1/15 size of pot (ignoring max rake which is rarely reached). Incidently looking at my stats the rake equates to roughly 8bb/100. A good win rate is normally 4bb/100, so effectively I need to be winning at 12bb/100 (obviously this is different with different people, and different tables- nits or maniacs- but this was my stats).

Now if you play a 5+0.50 9man sng, effectively it is a 49.5 dollar pot, and 4.5 dollars goes to rake. Now this is 1/11 rake, but it is a one off. Imagine you are playing a cash game with the other players with 5.5 dollars each, and play until the final 3 is reached/settled (and make the winner redistribute his money to the top 3), not forgetting blinds are increased. From logic, this should means at least 8 all ins (rarely is it multiway all in) and many many smaller pots..... It doesn't take a genius to realise that in this case you pay a lot less rake in the SNG format (since the all-in pot increases each time so you pay rake for the 5.5 dollars you bought in, in addition to the distributed money of people already knocked out- and obviously there is going to be hell of a lot more than 8 all in pots normally as long as the shortstack doesn't lose in some of them).

This applies to the stakes I play- which, I would guess most people on this site (and in general) play. As you move up, the rake in cash games drastically improves and becomes better to play rakewise compared to SNGs. For HUSNGs on FT for example the rake doesn't change until you move up higher than 1k.... So at some point, moving up in stakes, cash games are better to play in terms of rake, but for most of the low stakes grinders, I think that SNGs are the way to go.

What I can see however is that SNGs have "higher variance" and you can't just stop playing whenever you want. The 2 games are inherently different- imo in SNGs the play is eaiser, since stacks are shallower, and play is normally pretty automatic (e.g. you use jam/fold a lot later on). And in HUSNGs i suppose you can achieve a bigger edge especially against fish? Now I should point out that it is pretty obvious in the HU case that at low to medium stakes, HUSNGs >>HU cash in terms of rake.

Can someone could enlighten me otherwise on what I have said so far (e.g. maybe cashgames are good in terms of hourly?), or am I onto something here?

Anyway- until I move up high enough, I will be concentrating on SNGs and tournaments rather than cashgames.

chesslw

JamEaze

1 word: Rakeback!!!

chesslw

Surely that doesn't change anything since you would get the same rate of rakeback from playing sngs as well as cash?

I guess if you play lower lmits than 5 dollar sngs then the rake is a lot worse, but 5 dollars is a bi for a 5nl game which is normal for cash. Hence I think 5 dollar sngs are superior to cash at the same level?

ChrisB

I think you are right on many of your points, rake is really high in cash games but you cannot compare simply "we pay a lot of rake to win $5 in cashgames so isnt it better to just join a $5 sng?"

Well, look at it this way:

If you are a really good player you'll have 10% roi, this means that your average profit PER GAME is only 50c, which corresponds to 10bb on the cashtables, compare that to cashgames where a 10bb winrate post-rake is probably doable, you would need to play 100 hands to win 10bb on average, assuming you play 2 tables that's probably about the same time as the duration of the reg speed sng (about 100 hands per table, per hour)

And yeah, rakeback is massive for both.

chesslw

Yep- that is what I thought- cash games may be better in terms of hourly...

And I just realised you would get much more rakeback with cashgames since you play a lot more hands to win the same money in general (but imo at low stakes sngs still have lower rake in general).

Also in a vacuum I would have thought the 2 games should be similar for the fact that if one is better to play than the other then people would stop playing one of them...

Anyway, thanks for the replies.