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The RAKE
To understand what rakeback is you must first be aware of what the rake is: The rake is the method employed by card-rooms –online and casino—to make money. In other casino games, such as blackjack or roulette, the odds are tilted in favor of the house, and this is where the casinos make their money. Since you are competing against other players –and not the house—a poker site has no way of making money without charging some type of “fee”; and this fee is known as the rake.
The rake is a small percentage of the pot, or an added fee to a tournament buy-in, that the card-room takes as their payment –usually no more than 5% for cash games and a flat 10% fee added to a tournament buy-in. Generally, there is a minimum amount the pot must reach before any money is taken; and there is a preset cap (usually $3) that is the maximum the site will take from any pot. For tournaments, the fee is almost always 10% of the buy-in amount.
Most online poker sites take about 5% from the average pot –details on exactly how much, what the threshold is for taking increments of the pot, and what the maximum rake taken will be, can typically be found on the poker room’s website.
The area with the largest discrepancy in terms of the amount of rake collected tends to be the stakes you play –obviously sites cannot rake a penny table game the same way they rake a middle-stakes game. Therefore, you will often find the cap on the rake much smaller in the lower limit games –the cap in a $.25/$.50 limit game can be as low as $.50, as opposed to a $2/$4 games where the cap is $3.
RAKEBACK
Rakeback is a poker term used to describe a percentage of the total rake that you will receive back as an incentive to sign-up through a poker affiliate. How much rakeback you receive depends on how much you contribute to the rake: This figure is tallied by taking the total rake for the hand and dividing it by the number of players that were dealt-in. If the rake was $3, and there are 10 people at the table, than you contributed $.30. Your contributed rake would be $.30 for the hand, and from this $.30 you will receive x% in rakeback (this is using the dealt rake methodology. See dealt vs contributed rakeback for further information).
Your actual rakeback percentage will vary by site, generally anywhere from 27% - 40% --with very few sites falling outside those parameters. So if you are receiving 30% rakeback, in the above example where your contributed rake was $.30, you would be eligible for $.09 of rakeback.
The best part of rakeback is that the more you play, the more you earn! Every hand, whether you fold, raise, or call has the potential to make you money.
Start off by taking a look at our list of rakeback deals to find the rakeback offer most suited to your needs.
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