Understanding Rakeback

RakeBack

For professional online poker players rakeback needs no explanation, as it is generally essential to their bottom line of earnings, but to your average Joe and not so experienced player, rakeback is a relatively unknown term or entity.
Understanding Rake

To fully understand the meaning of the term "rake", you must first understand what the rake is. The rake is the way online poker rooms make their money, by collecting a percentage of every pot from every hand that was dealt. The percentage is not the same for all sites, but its value is somewhere in the vicinity of 5% or a maximum of $3. It does not sound like a lot, but when you consider the number of hands you will play over the period of say, a year, you will realise just how mcuh rake you will be paying to play poker.


Getting some of this rake back..

A way to start getting some money back from the rake you pay is by signing up through an affiliate. The affiliate keeps track of the rake you pay at every pot you have played. At the end of the month the poker room pays the affiliate a percentage of your rake.
Hence.. RAKE-BACK :o)

Affiliate sites have found a way to attract more players to sign up to different poker rooms through them by giving some of the money they receive from the poker rooms back to the players. This is what rakeback is all about, a way in which both parties involved wins. The affiliate gains more players through the deals they offer, and the players get some of their money back from each pot.
Even a losing poker player wins their rake back The importance of this procedure comes from the fact that each and every player, even the winner, loses the rake. Most players don’t even notice they are being charged for every hand or don’t think too much of it even if they do notice it, but why let the house get all the benefits? One of the most important aspects of rakeback is that it does not include only winning players, but all players who were involved in that hand.

EXAMPLE:

3 players involved in a pot where the rake would become 3$, then the rake attributed to each player would be 1$.

Now if the rakeback percentage would be 35%, then you would receive 0.35$ back in your pocket for that hand only.

If you would play 1000 hands like that every month you would receive 350$ rakeback by doing nothing, and that is apart from your winnings at the table.

The amount of the rakeback is affected by the stakes and the number of hands you play.

An average low limit player can earn up to a few hundred dollars every month, but the really heavy players, pros or higher, can earn thousands in rakeback and some even simply use rakebck to make a decent living.