Poker: RakeBack

 

The way that poker rooms make their money is known as Rake:

 

In order to understand what rakeback is then you need to understand firstly how the poker rooms make a profit from charging its real money players rake. For poker it is impossible for a casino to make any money, under normal circumstances, since the game is played between players without the casino participating (except in the provision of the dealer, and in the case on online casinos, the software), so all money should effectively only pass between players.

 

But, the casino needs to make some money in order to pay for its overheads, and they will also be looking to make a profit, otherwise it makes no business sense to run the game. Rake is the only method that casinos can use to ensure that they generate income from poker games, the rake should be considered as equivalent to an entry fee that is taken for organising the games.

 

The poker players are not losing money directly to the casino, the casino will be taking a small amount of cash out of each cash game pot, the portion that they take from the pot amounts to roughly 5% of the size of the pot, this is comparable to the percentage taken by a real life casino.

 

What, then, is rakeback?

 

Rakeback is an opportunity for poker players to save on rake costs. If you create a new poker room account via Rakeback.com then you can save, on average, 30% of the rake. Once a player has registered with the Rakeback.com system then they are able to track the amount of rake you have paid to the poker room.

 

 

Because Rakeback is an affiliated company with several different poker rooms; subsequently they have an agreement with the said poker rooms for a share in the revenue that they make from your payments, because of this they are then able to credit your account with the percentage of rake that they take back.

 

Rakeback.com also has a Rakeback calculator that you can use to establish the approximate amount that you contribute to the profits of the casino each time you play in a poker match, the calculator then estimates the amount that you can save.

 

 

Rakeback calculations:

 

There are several poker rooms that will display the amount of rake that is removed from a pot, but as yet, no rooms display the calculated individual contributions (remember some people will be contributing more to the rake because they have wagered more during the game), but the poker rooms do have access to this knowledge as it is required for their accounting practices. It is the individual amount that the Rakeback calculator is estimating.

 

There are different strategies that poker rooms use to calculate the amount of rake that is contributed by the individual, but the two main strategies are shared and contributed.

The shared strategy means that the rake is divided equally between the players who have been received cards.

 

The contributed strategy means that the players will have to contribute money to the pot in order to be counted in the rake, and the amount accredited to the player is dependent on the amount of rake that they have placed in the pot.

 

 

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