Poker rooms charge players a fee to play at their site, however this is called ‘rake’. ‘rake’ is the term that refers to the rake taken from each pot, by the poker room.
The amount taken from each pot varies by limits, but is generally anywhere from $1-$3 on average per hand. ‘Rake’ can also refer to the amount of cash that the poker house itself takes from each hand.
This varies hugely from site to site, from week to week, from month to month and even from year to year. Most of the time however, the term ‘rake’ is reserved for the cash that the poker house makes from the rake.
So why, when you hear the term ‘rakeback’, do you automatically think of cash back? Not quite. Many players confuse ‘rake’ with ‘cash back’. Cash back is quite often (and often wrongly) thought of as being similar to rakeback. It’s not.
The problem with cash back is that although there is a cashback bonus in theory, usually you have to spend a certain amount of hands playing hands to unlock the bonus. On top of this, since cashback only allows for one in each 20 hands, it is far less likely to be a wise investment if the poker room has a very loose player population. A player with a large stack could well get lucky and draw out on you.
While definitely an efficient way to leverage your rakeback earning, the handshake connection between rakeback and cashback is tenuous at best. Just as playing with your own money won’t benefit you, playing with somebody else’s money won’t benefit you either. The two categories are far too dissimilar to be considered as one and the same.
The Two Most Common Kinds of Rakeback
The two games that have the most possible connection to rakeback are tournament based poker and sit and go poker. Tournament based poker sites such as Carbon Poker and Poker Stars offer players a choice between tournament credits and real cash. credits are the game within the game that allows you to buy in for cheap, usually at a low cost. The big advantage of tournament credits is that the poker house does not take a fee from you, but you can usually earn back the cost of the tournament in your own money (and at times no fee at all). The size of the payout vary considerably from site to site, but are usually well above 1% of the money put in.
Sit and Go Poker, on the other hand, has the most potential to be profitable for the player, because of the fact that the game is highly volatile and a player can walk away with thousands of dollars in a very short period of time. Yet, sit and go poker tends to attract players from all over the world, attracting many weaker players who are looking to make quick money. The fact that the game is highly fluctuated and people are more likely to toss it all around makes sit and go poker a very lucrative game, but one that also contains many flops that only a pure gambling addict can play at ease.
Unlike cash games, where you can walk away with nothing, in a sit and go poker, you have a cost for each game and every game. Your rakeback is based on the cost of the buy-in, which includes the rake. Therefore, if you prefer to play strictly for recreation, you can play zero-cost tournaments. As soon as you loose all your chips in a sit and go tournament, you have to pay a certain amount to get your rake back. Usually this amount is much more than the amount you would get for nothing!
Instantly cash in your rakeback
If you play poker regularly, you definitely should know that you must have a profitable poker account if you want to continue to play on-line. Rakeback means that you will make a good profit when you are playing poker. Your poker account is the one you refer to many players, who play poker for a living or who earn a good side income from Poker. If you already have a poker account, but you only get rakeback for some games, you can notdedicate any of your poker payments to the rakeback account.
Good thing also for the part-time poker88 players, who play solely for a living, is that the rakeback payments are made to them regularly, except for the rare situation, when the poker room decides to exclude some games from the rakeback network. In those networks, you can still collect rakeback for some games, but only some of them:
You can also discover some interesting poker rooms that offer rakeback payments for life, such as Alloker poker, Poker Stars, Titan poker, CD poker, Caribbean poker, PokerRoom, Paradise poker, Party poker, Everest poker, sports books poker, Paradise poker, Party poker and Tide poker.
