Rakeback – How to get Cash Back from Playing Poker Online

Have you ever wondered how poker rooms make their money?  Every online poker room takes a small percentage of the amount bet in a pot, usually around five percent.  If 10 dollars in bet in a hand online, the room is going to take around 50 cents, meaning only 9 dollars and 50 cents would go to whoever won the pot.

50 cents may not seem like much in this example, but if you play often this percentage that the house takes will likely be the difference between being profitable and losing money in the long run.  Thankfully many online poker rooms offer “rakeback”, which means you have the opportunity to get between 20-50% of the rake that you contribute to back.  Remember, you do not get 30% of the entire rake back, just the percentage of whatever you contributed to in the hand.  Rakeback will only generate pennies for you in most hands, but over the course of a month those pennies could grow to be hundreds of dollars, depending on how much you contributed to the poker rooms rake.

If you are like me, you do not want to potentially leave hundreds or even thousands of dollars on the table, especially if it means doing little to no work.  However there are a few obstacles in the way:

1. Most of the time you will not be able to get a rakeback deal at a site that you currently have an account on.  If you are already playing poker at Bodog, for example, you will not be able to get rakeback their under the same account.  You will either have to look into creating another account or you might have to look into playing at a different room online.

2. Not all poker rooms offer rakeback.  The majority of poker rooms do offer rakeback, but some do not.  Also, rooms are not going to publicly advertise their rakeback deals, they like taking healthy margins, but there are deals available to be had.

3. You will not be able to get a rakeback deal directly from a room.  Most of the time you will need to sign up under a poker affiliate.  If you sign up under his/her link he might earn 45% of your rake and offer you 35%.  In this case the poker room would get business, which benefits it, the affiliate would be getting 10% of your rake each month and you would be getting 35% of your rake back.  This situation benefits everyone involved, which is why rakeback is becoming more and more popular.

If you opt to join a rakeback program, the money owed to you should be deposited automatically in your player account each month.  Some deals pay you directly, through Neteller or Moneybookers for example, it all depends on your particular situation.  Payment is a breeze and you will not have to do anything to get it, everything should be done automatically monthly.

If you wager 1000 dollars monthly online, you are contributing 50 dollars to the rake and you would receive 15 dollars.  This is assuming that the room takes 5% of your bets and you are getting a 30% rakeback deal.  This may seem like a lot of work for 15 dollars, but you need to remember that this will all be on autopilot, meaning that you do not have to lift a finger in this process.  Also there are opportunities available to get a bigger “piece of the pie” as they say.

Rakeback deals are similar to credit card deals, where credit card companies give you 1-5% cash back.  Both poker rooms and credit card companies are still making a profit off of your business, but you also have the opportunity to gain hundreds or thousands of extra dollars over time by doing absolutely nothing!  These deals are a good way for companies to keep their customers and build loyalty.  Rakeback should always work out for every party involved, no one is getting the short end of the stick.

In the end, rakeback is wonderful, and necessary if you are a serious online poker player.  If you play “with the big boys” and you would never dream of making 50 cent bets online, rakeback is a necessity for you.  Quickly you will find out how important it is to get 1-3% of what you bet back, automatically.  If you are a casual player and you do not make more than 100-500 dollars in online poker bets a month, rakeback is likely not going to amount to much for you.  Remember that this is all calculated on what you bet.  You can start off with $1,000 dollars in your account, end up with $1,200 and contribute $10,000 to pots over the course of a month.  It depends on your playing style and what stakes you play at online.

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