Rakeback

Rakeback is one of the most offered promotions that players can get when they register for a poker room. Rakeback basically means that you will get a fixed percentage of the fee (rake) that you pay to the house, therefore rakeback.

Rakeback is a promotional tool that was started around 2004, where players were getting harder to get and started to notice the high amounts of rake they were paying. This caused some of the sites that were hurting or new to the industry to provide players with a portion of the rake back to them, which immediately attracted lots of poker players.

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All players playing poker online for real money will be paying rake to the site. It is integrated in the buy-in for tournaments and sit n goes and in cash games it is charged every time a hand sees a flop. The rake varies from site to site, but is in general from 2.5-5% of the total buy-in or of the total pot. There are of course limits to how much rake you will be paying, which once again depends on the site that you are playing on.

If you are receiving rakeback payments from the poker site you are playing on or from your affiliate, it is important to know that it doesn’t matter if you are winning or losing, you will always receive your rakeback. Rakeback is solely based on the amount of rake that you have paid and not based on if you are winning or losing in any way.

Rakeback percentages varies from site to site as the sites will be able to choose the percentage they want to offer. You will in general find rakeback percentages from 20% and up to 50% and you can also receive additional payments from other promotions on top of that in some cases. 

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How Do I Get Rakeback?

It is quite easy to receive rakeback payments as a player, if the site you are playing on offers it. Not all sites out there offers direct rakeback, but instead offers a VIP system for their players that rewards differently but which is basically the same as rakeback.

To find out if a site has rakeback and if you can get it you will have two choices. The first choice is to visit the site you wish to play on and see if they are writing about rakeback anywhere on the site. Alternatively you can always contact the support of the site and hear if they can offer you any sort of rakeback deal for your play in their site.

The other option is to sign up through an affiliate and see what the partners of him offers. You can have a look in our Poker Review Section, where you will find all the best rakeback and VIP system offers and ensure that you will not lose out on any sort of value. You can also contact us and hear more about where we recommend that you play and where you’ll get the best value.

One thing you have to be aware of when you receive a rakeback deal is if it has any sort of rake requirement to actually receive payments. There are sites that requires a minimum amount of rake in order to pay out rakeback, but these are very rare. Just make sure to always check with the site or your affiliate if there are any requirements and if there is, find out if you can reach them or not.

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How is Rakeback Calculated?

Calculating rakeback is quite simple, it is calculating the rake you paid that is slightly difficult. If we assume that you have a flat 30% rakeback deal, then you simply take the amount you raked and multiply it by 0.30 and you have the amount of rakeback that you should receive in your account on the payment day.

However it can be difficult to know exactly how much you raked, since there are different ways of calculating rake and you might end up thousands of hands, not knowing exactly how many you paid rake in and so on.

There are several different ways of calculating the rake that you paid to a poker room, which depends on the room or network you are playing on. The most commonly used rake payment method is the weighted contributed method. The weighted contributed method is based upon you receiving rakeback on the actual rake that you paid, which for most seems the most fair. Basically you will always get rakeback on the exact amount of rake you paid and no one else can influence how much rake you have paid.

Another way of calculating the rake and distributing rakeback is through the dealt rake method. This method doesn’t consider the amount of rake that you have paid, but will instead reward you with a share of the total rake paid in each hand you get dealt. This means that if you sit five players on a table that are dealt cards and you fold, i.e. not paying any rake, and the total rake ends up at $1, all 5 players will be counted as having paid $0.2 in rake, despite not having paid any rake.

There are also other more unique ways of calculating rake, such as the essence system on the Ongame network. However these other methods are not fully disclosed to the public, so we cannot tell you anything about them.


Can I Get Rakeback With Other Promotions?

Some sites allows you to take advantage of other promotions while you receive rakeback and other don’t. It all depends on the site you are playing on and you should always do a check of the site and their regulations regarding this, before signing up and playing.

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Most commonly you’ll find sites offering rakeback and a bonus that provides you with a high return in the beginning and once the bonus has been cleared you’ll settle for rakeback plus other types of promotions without any deductions on your rakeback payments.

In other cases it will be the other way around and everything you get besides rakeback will be deducted from your total rakeback payment. It might still be better value sometimes to take other promotions along with rakeback, but in general it isn’t.