According to a report on PokerListings.com, Party Poker will be changing its rake structure starting tomorrow, August 24th.  Both the way raked hands are calculated and the rake schedule will be adjusted.

Currently, Party Poker uses the “dealt” method for determining whether or not a player is credited with a  raked hand.  In this method, it does not matter how tight or loose a player is; what matters is simply whether or not a player was dealt cards in the hand.  As it stands now, a player is credited with a raked hand if he is dealt cards, regardless of how far he advances in the hand, and if he is allocated at least one cent of rake.  For example, if five players are dealt cards in a hand and 50 cents is taken from the pot in the form of rake, each player is allocated (or has generated) 10 cents of rake (50 cents divided by five players).  In this case, each of the five players will receive credit for a raked hand.

The dealt method is by far the most preferred raked hand method for very tight players, as they can fold their way to scores of raked hands, which are often needed to fulfill various bonus and promotional requirements.

The new method is “weighted contributed.” With this method, players get credit for the proportion of rake they actually contribute.  Those who play fast and loose, and therefore put more money into the pot than their opponents, will be credited with more rake generated.  For example, if five players in a $1/$2 No-Limit Hold’em game are dealt cards, Players A and B fold pre-flop (let’s say they didn’t pay any blinds), Player C ends up putting $10 in the pot and Players D and E put in $5 each, the end result is a $20 pot with $1 taken as rake.  Because Player C contributed half of the pot ($10 of the $20 total), he generated 50 cents of the rake.  Players D and E would each be allocated 25 cents of the rake, as they each contributed to a quarter of the pot.

The importance of this is that Party Poker awards two Party Points for every $1 a player generates in rake.  Therefore, in the above example, Player C would receive one point, Players D and E would receive half a point, and Players A and B would get no points.  With the dealt method, everyone would have generated 20 cents and therefore earned two-fifths of a point.  With tomorrow’s new weighted contributed method, Players C, D, and E, are all rewarded for putting money in the pot, whereas Players A and B contributed nothing, so they get nothing.

As for the rake structure, in No-Limt and Pot-Limit games, the highest rake levels will be shifted down.  Rather than started at $15/$30, the highest rake levels will now start at just $3/$6.  Everything below $3/$6 will remain the same.  In Fixed Limit games, the micro-limit games, those with blinds from $0.02/$0.04 to $0.05/$0.10 will have one cent raked for every 20 cents in the pot, rather than one cent for every 10 cents in the pot.  The maximum rake at these tables will still be 50 cents.