Leading rakeback site rakeback.com takes a look at rakeback and how you can benefit from the best deals.
As online poker games get tougher and the easy money dries up it’s more important than ever that each and every player should be getting as much value as possible.
Similarly, poker rooms must offer good deals to keep players loyal and stop them from leaving, with the new poker sites busy ‘bonus whoring’ themselves in an already oversaturated market. One solution to both these needs is rakeback.
What is rakeback?
Put simply, rakeback is the process by which you get back part of the rake that you generate to online poker rooms whenever you play. Most serious players pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars in rake to poker rooms each month but even rake paid by casual players soon mounts up. If you sign up for a rakeback deal you can usually expect to receive around a third of the rake you generate paid back to you either in the form of a cheque or direct into your player account. For example, if you pay $1,000 in rake a month, you will be paid $300 at the end of the month.
Rake is the only way for poker rooms to make profit, as poker players wage money against each other and not against the house. Financial Times estimated the total online poker revenue to be $5.9 billion in 2008, so there is plenty of rake charged every day. Leading rakeback site Rakeback.com players alone pay a seven digit value of rake every month.
How do rakeback sites work?
Rakeback.com has been operating for five years and has over 53,000 members, making it one of the leading rake sites. When a player downloads a poker client from www.rakeback.com and creates a poker room account, a part of the rake generated by that account will be credited as rakeback directly back to the player’s poker room cashier once a month.
Behind the scenes there is a revenue share marketing agreement between the poker room and Rakeback.com, and every player’s rake contribution is tracked for the purpose of rakeback payments.
SNGs
When you play a Sit and Go (SNG) it’s usually clear what the rakeback should be. For instance, if you play a $10+$1 SNG you know that the fee (or rake) you are paying is $1, so it’s easy to calculate how much of that money you will receive back in rakeback according to the percentage deal you are on.
Cash Games
For cash games every pot that sees a sees a flop gets raked. It’s easy for each poker room to work out what rake they take from each pot (usually 5% up to $3). However, how a poker room calculates your personal rakeback is a little bit more complicated. There are two main methods that poker rooms use to calculate your personal rakeback in a cash game – ‘contributed rakeback’, and ‘dealt rakeback’.
‘Contributed rakeback’ is the industry standard. For every dollar that you personally put in the pot, you take a percentage of that back. Let’s say you contribute $1 in rake to a pot; the rakeback you would receive on a 33% deal would be $0.33, regardless of whether you won or lost the pot. This is the fairest way of calculating rake; you earn money on everything you put in the pot and you don’t earn money on anything else other people put in the pot. Most poker rooms this method for calculating player rake.
The advantages of using ‘contributed rake’ for loose-aggressive players is obvious. Every time you enter a pot you’ll receive some money back. For a tight player who sits and waits for premium hands and doesn’t play too many pots, the ‘contributed rake’ method of calculating rakeback isn’t so attractive.
‘Dealt rakeback’ is a method of calculating rakeback that is getting more and more scarce as it’s a less fair way of calculating rake. With this method if you are dealt cards you are considered to have contributed to the pot and therefore eligible for rakeback. The rake per hand is determined by dividing the amount of rake by the amount of the players in the pot. For example, if you are in a 10-handed Hold’em game and the rake taken from a hand is $3, you would be considered to have contributed $0.30 to pot. Poker rooms that offer ‘dealt rakeback’ deals are Full Tilt Poker and any skin on the Cake Poker network.
Obviously, ‘dealt rakeback’ is a tight player’s dream! All you have to do is be dealt cards and you can gain rakeback from this. Open up 8 tables at once and you’re well on the way to a tidy little income, as long as you’re a break-even player! Well, that’s the idea.
Why Do Poker Rooms Offer Rakeback?
Have the poker rooms suddenly found a heart and want to cut the costs for people to play the beautiful game? Not quite. By offering rakeback, the poker rooms are paying for your loyalty and ensuring that you keep returning to the their tables.
Much in the same way as supermarkets offer their own clubcards to their shoppers - you earn more points the more money you spend - rakeback deals reward your play and loyalty. However, whereas with supermarket cards years of shopping loyalty are rewarded with just enough points on your clubcard to buy a frozen pizza (and not even one of those nice Pizza Express ones either), rakeback gives you instant cash at the end of the month.
Who is Rakeback For?
Rakeback should be for everyone. After all, it’s money you’ve generated to the ‘house’ that you otherwise would never see again; why not get a deal to get some of this back?
A lot of casual players think rakeback is only for big players, but this is not the case. Obviously bigger players get bigger cheques at the end of the month, but assuming you’re not playing $0.01/$0.02 cash or a single $1 SNG once a month rakeback is worthwhile for you too.
As an example, a low limit player sitting on one 10c/25c NLHE table for one hour a day can earn $27 rakeback a month, or $324 a year. For a Sit ‘n’ Go fan, someone playing 4 SNGs at $5.50 could expect $18.60 back, which equates to $219 in a year. Add to this some longer sessions at the weekend, the odd bigger MTT or a shot at the higher limits and your rakeback earnings soon rack up.
As a side note on SNGs, rakeback is ultra-important for SNG players. SNG grinders have to put in a massive volume of games due to the small edges, which gets increasingly smaller as players educate themselves better in strategy and ICM.
Interestingly rakeback becomes less relevant for MTT players because it’s generally a low-volume form of poker. If you only play MTTs for a living, you usually have a bigger edge over most of the field and due to the time taken to complete MTTs you pay fewer fees due to the lower volume of games you play.
What are the benefits of rakeback sites for the players?
Rakeback in itself is a huge added value to every poker player. The rakeback site could be seen as the agent of poker players, looking after their best interest by organizing rakeback deals and exclusive promotions that add further value. Not just pure cold cash, but taking part in the poker lifestyle as well. For example in November we’ll be running a promotion where one Rakeback.com player is flown to Las Vegas and picked up from the airport by poker legend Doyle Brunson in his limousine.
Is it possible to make money from rake without even spending any money in the game?
That is not possible in practice, as poker games are constructed in a way that every player needs to pay blinds, so you cannot participate in the game without wagering money. Remember that rakeback is a partial refund of fees that has been charged from you, it is not miracle money out of thin air.
Do players play at certain times or certain games specifically to take advantage of rakeback?
No, or they should not. Rake stays the same around the clock, so playing time does not matter. Certain games or stakes can have a proportionally bigger rake schedule, but it is again important to remember that paying more rake and getting 30% of it back leads to less money overall to the player. Better advantage is gained by playing in games where proportionally lower rake is charged, and getting rakeback from that rake.
If players only play the really low stakes cash games is it worth their while signing onto a rake site?
Definitely. The proportion of rakeback to your bankroll size and stakes stays the same, so $10 rakeback to a micro stakes player can feel the same as $1,000 rakeback to a high stakes player. And of course when you learn to play better poker and rise up in the stakes, you’ll be glad that you took the small trouble of downloading your poker client from Rakeback.com and are now getting big rakeback payments.
Do players need to play constantly to take advantage of rake back?
No, there are no time limits and rakeback is for the life of your poker account. You accumulate rakeback when rake is charged from you.
How much money can players expect to get back in rake per day/month/year on average?
For most players rakeback can be tens of dollars every month. Regular medium to higher stakes players can expect to get over $1,000 rakeback per month. The record rakeback paid to a Rakeback.com player is $11,502.70. Our website has a rakeback calculator where you can enter your game type and stakes, and it’ll return an estimate of your rake and rakeback: rakeback.com/rakeback-calculator
What are the extra benefits of rakeback.com compared to the other sites?
Rakeback.com is the one-stop solution for poker players trying to get the most added value for their poker play. Other than generous rakeback offers with payments direct into your poker account, we offer dedicated and speedy customer service, automated rake tracking and statistics, exclusive promotions with the largest poker rooms in the world, and a large community of like minded poker enthusiasts.
Can players join several different poker rooms through the same rake site?
Absolutely. The only limitation is that a player can only have one account per poker room, so therefore rakeback cannot be added to any existing poker account that was not downloaded through Rakeback.com. |
