The World of Rakeback Pros
It’s not hard to see the appeal for signing up for one of the best online rakeback deals at RakeBrain, as playing without rakeback is basically the same thing as lighting money on fire. If you’re going to play poker, there’s no reason to turn down absolutely free money, especially if you’re a high-volume grinder that plays a ton of hands each month. As rakeback has become more common, though, a new breed of online poker player has emerged: the rakeback pro.
Rakeback pros take the basic appeal of rakeback (getting a percentage of the rake you pay returned to you each month in cash) and amp it up the extreme, with some logging hundreds of thousands of hands every single month. That might seem impossible at first glance but if you can handle playing 24-36 tables at a time (which is possible on some online poker sites where the software allows it) and can grind it out for 6-8 hours a day, it’s actually not that hard to play 200,000+ hands in a month (or more for the truly insane).
If you’re wondering how someone could possibly play that many tables for that long and still playing winning poker, that’s a great question, and the easy answer is simple: they don’t. It takes a little re-arranging of how you think about poker, but the goal of a rakeback pro is to simply break even or lose a small amount from their actual play at the tables. They play such a high volume that they can easily make $7,000-$8,000/month in rakeback, so even if they lose a small amount they can still make a nice profit each and every month.
Rakeback pros who are members of RakeBrain are also often eligible for nice payouts from rake chases or rake races, as they’re almost guaranteed to finish in the top few spots and typically eligible for extra cash prizes that are often in excess of $1,000. The mechanics of playing that many tables can also be simplified by using third-party software programs or macros that let players hotkey certain actions (such as designating a certain key on the keyboard to always raise a set amount, or another key to pull up the next table) and using two or three monitors can make it easier to follow the action.
While some players find the idea of grinding it out as a rakeback pro a boring and depressing idea (as you don’t have much room to play creative poker or really improve your game), others find comfort in the stability of it; if you have the skills it requires it can be a much lower variance way of making a living from playing poker.
