Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Rakeback
If you play online poker long enough and spend any time on forums or discussion boards you’ll eventually hear about rakeback, which some players speak of in awed, hushed tones, as if they’ve just found the Holy Grail. For some players, that’s an apt analogy, as rakeback can often make the difference between a winning and losing month, and involves doing absolutely nothing other than what they enjoying: playing lots and lots of poker.
Rakeback may sound complicated but it’s a pretty simple concept; each hand of online poker you play has a certain amount of money subtracted from the pot which is what the house keeps as its profits -- that money is called the rake. For cash games, the rake usually ranges from .05 to $3, depending on the stakes you’re playing; tournaments and Sit n Gos are raked as well, but in a slightly different way as the rake is the $1 fee you pay when playing a $11 + $1 tournament. Like taxes, you can’t avoid paying the rake, but many players don’t even notice as it’s typically 5% or less of the final pot pushed to the winner.
Players with a rakeback deal get exactly that: a refund of some of the rake they pay back. Think of it like a cashback deal on a credit card based on how much you spend or getting awarded frequent flier miles for flying with a certain airline. The online poker industry is very competitive so sites are willing to do anything to keep their customers happy, including giving some of them a percentage of the rake they pay back to them. Their profits might be a bit smaller for that customer who gets rakeback but it’s better to make a little less on that customer than to lose their play entirely to another rival poker site.
The amount of cash you’ll get back for a rakeback deal depends on how much you play each month, what stakes you play, and what sort of rakeback deal you have, but it’s not unusual for players to get hundreds of dollars back every month via rakeback. If you play a ton of poker (think tens of thousands of hands per month) at mid stakes or higher, you might be in line for thousands of dollars a month in rakeback. Since the rakeback you get is a percentage of how much rake you pay in total, you’ll get more back the higher the stakes you play, since the pots are bigger so the total rake deducted is higher.
Getting rakeback is pretty simple, especially if you sign up with RakeBrain, which is one of the largest and most trusted rakeback sites on the Web. You’ll also find the best rakeback deals there, with some offers paying you back 35-40% of what you rake every month in cash, deposited directly into your online poker room account. It’s important to sign up for rakeback with a big provider like RakeBrain, as not only will it ensure you get your rakeback paid in a timely fashion but they also negotiate much better deals than you’d otherwise get.
