Rakeback is still a relatively new concept in the online poker industry and to truly understand what rakeback is you must first know what rake is. In cash games the rake for each hand is the amount of money the poker room takes from the pot. The fees in tournaments are another form of rake. Basically your rake is all of the money that the poker room makes off of you as a player. A lot of normal casual players rake upwards of $1000 each month, so as you can see receiving a portion of this amount back is very lucrative. For example, a player who plays only $0.25/$0.50 tables 4 at a time for an average of 2 hours a day for a month would rake about $1080 a month. If this player was playing with rakeback, then rakeback payment for the month would be $324. This is a good chunk of change.
To calculate your cash game rake poker rooms use one of two methods. There is the dealt method where each player dealt in the hand is said to have generated the same amount of rake regardless of their play in the pot. Then there is the contribution method where the amount of rake that you are said to have generated depends on the portion of the pot you contributed. For example, if you contributed $10 into a $40 pot that raked $2, then you are said to have generated $0.50 in rake and you will earn your 30% rakeback on this amount.
Rakeback is the amount of your rake that the poker room gives you back as a refund. Typically the refund is made at the beginning of the month for your rake in the previous month. PKR for example issues a rakeback payment directly to your account by the 10th of the month for your rake from the previous month. The PKR rakeback offer of 30% is pretty standard in the industry with some other poker rooms offering slightly lower or slightly higher rakeback percentages.
A lot of players think this rakeback thing is too good to be true at first and think that there must be some catch. Well to be honest there is absolutely no catch. The only reason not every player in the world doesn’t have a rakeback account is because they don’t know about it. Rakeback is kind of the poker rooms little secret that they don’t like to talk about because it means less profits for them. This is the reason that poker rooms don’t just lower the amount of rake they take and forget about this extra hassle that is rakeback. It’s because that would cost them much more money than offering rakeback to players in the know. But now that you have read this article you are in on the secret and can take advantage by signing up for rakeback at PKR or Americas Cardroom (US Players).
