Heads-Up Play and the Rake

So, it seems that lately Heads-Up (HU) play is all the rage. I have viewed a couple of videos of people playing HU (sample videos from Deuces Cracked, a few posted videos on 2+2) and man is it a different game. Watching it may cause me to be an even bigger showdown monkey shorthanded than I already am.

But actually the most striking thing about the whole deal was not the wacky hands and hyper-aggro play - it was the money that gets taken off the table in rake. In "regular" play (whether 6-max or FR) you tend not to notice how much money is being taken off the table in rake, but in a HU freezeout match, this effect is right in your face.

For example, in the video I finished watching today, two players players faced off at $2/$4 starting with $200 stacks. About 90 minutes later, one of the players was bust and the other had only $311 sitting in front of them. That is $89 in rake - almost $60/hr in the pockets of the casino! And this for nearly no marginal cost of having an extra table in the lobby. Looks like I need to look into opening one of these poker site thingies..... :-)

Anyways, looking at it from the player's position and not the casino, how large a drain is this rake? Well, by the PokerTracker stats that were shown, near the end of the match they had played 326 hands. Admittedly this only seemed to update every 5 minutes or so, so the number may be a bit higher than that. Call it 340 hands, which comes out to about 220 hands per hour. Seems about right. In those 340 hands, they paid 22.25 BB in rake for a rake rate of 6.5 BB/100!!!! That just seems insane. I don't recall off my head what the corresponding rake is for $2/$4 full ring (and it depends on your playing style), but IIRC it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 BB/100. Short-handed was somewhere around 3-5 BB/100 in rake.

Can 6.5 BB/100 be beaten? I'm sure it can, given the right opponent - table selection becomes paramount. However, it seems to me that two good HU players are just trading their money back and forth until the house gets it all.