The rakeback dilemma
Rakeback is a pretty interesting online poker phenomenon, one that I must admit evaded me for quite a while in the beginning. Even when I first heard about it, I couldn’t really get my head around it: why would the online poker room let go of part of its revenue? Doesn’t it do the same through the sign-up deals it offers?
After I did realize what rakeback was about and how it was calculated/awarded, I couldn’t figure out why there were still players out there who played without one such rakeback deal. Before I go any further though, I think I need to explain the concept or rakeback, also known by experts as rake rebate.
Through rakeback, the online poker room lets go of a certain percentage of the rake it collects from a player, giving it right back to him (hence the “rebate” in it name).
Why would a poker room do such a thing? Well, not all poker rooms are willing to do it. Sites like PokerStars or Titan Poker will not give their players rakeback, for a whole bunch of reasons, which I’m not going to detail in this here piece. A more important question is: how do poker rooms determine the exact amount of rake rebate they owe to individual players. The answer is by no means a simple one, at least not for a layman like myself.Here’s some info I picked up on rakemeback.com regarding the matter:
Poker rooms use three basic ways to calculate players’ rake contributions (and thus implicitly the rakeback they’re due).
One such method, called the dealt rake method, allots rake contribution to all those who are dealt into the hand. This algo is mathematically simple, but it gives even those credit who do not actually contribute to the pot.
The other method, the contributed rake method, only rewards those who do get some chips into the middle.
The third method, the weighted contributed rake method, determines the amount of money each of the active players contribute to the pot and awards credit for the contributed rake in a direct proportion with it. I’m not quite sure what advantages and drawbacks each of these methods carry, but this is it in a nutshell.
The poker rake is a fee players pay to the house on each hand they play btw. The “house” which is the online poker room in this instance, collects its revenues through this rake. The rake is usually a minute percentage of each real money pot players play. In live poker, rake is collected differently: players usually have to pay a set fee for each hour they spend at the poker table.
Poker prop deals are unusually generous rakeback deals, which often allow players to play rake free in exchange for certain services they have to provide.
Why do so few people know about the poker rakeback (and poker prop deals) when apparently serious and solid websites like rakemeback.com do their best to fill everyone in on the opportunities? Who knows… If poker players put a little more effort into reading up on their game instead of tilting at the tables, the number of rakeback-less players would probably be much smaller.