getting Rakeback? Any online holdem player who wants to maximize their win rate needs to be. If you are or want to be a winning online poker player, rakeback is your best friend.
What is it that makes rakeback so great? It’s the only thing you can have in poker to make money without any effort on your part whatsoever. To be successful in online poker, in general, you need to be skilled at game selection, reading opponents and understanding poker strategy. To be successful with rakeback, all you need to do is play.
Being in a rakeback program does not guarantee texas holdem poker success. What it does mean is that wherever you are on the poker spectrum, you’ll be a little bit closer to your goal. In online poker, rake is the only aspect you cannot control. If you’re losing too much at one game, you can always move to an easier game. If you find leaks in your game, you can plug them. However, nothing can change the fact that the online poker room will take up to $3 or $4 out of every pot you play. There is no way to counteract the effect this has on your win rate.
Until now, that is. Thanks to your friend Poker Rooms, you can beat the rake, at least to some extent. The way it works is simple. You go to a rakeback site online and choose from a list of participating online Rake back. These rooms may vary as to the amount of rakeback they offer, which is usually in the neighborhood of 30 percent of your credited rake. Once you find the site you like, assuming you do not already have an account with that site, sign-up through the rakeback site. Once you’re signed up, you can expect to get a percentage of your rake returned to you every month.
Whether the site uses a dealt, or shared, method to calculate your rake, where all players participate in rake credit equally or a contributed method, where your rake is based on how much you put into each pot, you’ll be amazed at how much money you save in rakeback each month. Keep that money, or add it to your bankroll to play in more and bigger games. When you see the effect on your win rate, you’ll understand very quickly why rakeback is the online poker player’s best friend.
How to select a Rakeback Deals offer
This article presumes that you’ve read our two previous articles on understanding rakeback is and how rakeback is calculated. If you haven’t, I recommend you do so before continuing with this article on comparing and contrasting the many rakeback offers out there.
If this article conveys one message to you, it is this: don’t just go for the highest percentage. Sometimes the online poker room offering 50% rakeback is also offering the best overall rakeback program, but sometimes not. In fact, often not. Because there are other factors determining the value of a rakeback offer besides the percentage.
For starters, remember that the percentage offered is not simply taken from the total amount of money you paid in rake in a given month. It’s rarely that simple. Instead, the rakeback percentage is taken from the MGR (monthly gross revenue or monthly gross rake, depending on who you ask, other sites will call it “Total Rake” or “Net Revenue” or some variation thereof, but the concept is the same regardless). And how the online poker room in question figures out the MGR has an enormous effect on the amount of rakeback you end up getting.
Is the MGR determined by the number of hands you were dealt or by the number of pots you contributed chips to? Or, as it is with still other online poker rooms, is it tabulated based on exactly how much money you contributed to each rake?
This makes a big difference. If the MGR is dependent on you putting chips into the pot (whether or not the amount matters) it is, in essence, ruling out any hand that you folded out of before paying any blinds or bets from being credited towards your Poker Rakeback deals. More, when the amount of each player’s individual contribution is considered, you essentially need to spend more to make more. On the surface, at least, it sounds like the better deals are the ones that credit you even for hands that didn’t cost you a dime to see.
Then again, what if you take your poker game seriously. What if you don’t want someone trying to milk the system from earning the same amount of rakeback as you, who’ve put loads of chips into the pot in a genuine effort to win some hands? Then for you a progressive rakeback deal might be better, since the rakeback percentage fluctuates for each person depending on how much of the rake they specifically contributed.
Which end of the rakeback program spectrum serves you best depends very much, then, on your motives for playing and your modus operandi. If you fold a lot before even seeing the flop, then a flat rakeback program might be better for you. If you bet, raise, and bluff a lot, then I’d go for a progressive program. Once you know the answer to this question, you can start to compare rakeback programs on an apples-to-apples basis (comparing flat rakebacks against other flat rakebacks and progressive rakebacks against other progressive rakebacks).
The other factors you’ll want to consider when choosing a rakeback program are whether or not tournament fees are included when figuring out the MGR, you’re looking for a “Yes”, and whether bonuses you receive are subtracted from the rakes you’re credited with having paid. Here you’re looking for a “No”.
Now that you have an idea what kinds of rakeback programs there are and you know what factors differentiate similar sounding Bonus Code Specials offers from one another, you are ready, finally, to choose which online poker rooms to join.
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