The best rakeback deals

A popular strategy by places such as Fat Poker is to ramp up the rake and offer extremely attractive Rakeback rates in the hope that player's won't research the net cost of rake - the net cost of rake is ultimately the figure that matters to the professional player but it is ambiguous to calculate once you consider temporary bonuses and varying levels of rake with different numbers of players.

The problem with bonuses is that they don't encourage long term play, once the bonus runs out (during which the effective cash back can be greater than 100%), players move onto the next site, often within the same network. Rather than focusing on the quality of play by investing in clean, fast and attractive software, these unprofitable poker rooms are engaged in a race to the bottom. Rather than each poker skin colluding for the greater good of the network (i.e. attracting poor players) they instead focus on attracting the high raking sharks which ultimately follow the fish. It is a false economy and helps explain the polarisation in fortunes between the likes of Pokerstars, Full Tilt and Party Poker compared with the rest of pack. These leaders discourage or forbid Rakeback and are not networks - maybe the likes of Cake and Merge should rethink their strategy.

Rakeback is just part of online card rooms. Like multi-tabling and isolating limpers, it's pretty much automatic to higher volume, regular players. PokerStars Rakeback can have a huge effect on your bankroll and winrate. Just how big of an impact? Many people don't even realize the actual numbers. In fact, the rake can be nearly 5 big blinds/100 hands (even higher at the lower stakes)! To put that in numbers, if you are a 100NL player, every 100,000 hands, you could be paying more than $5,000 just in rake! So if you play 100,000 hands and let's just say you run break-even against the players, you actually would end up down $5,000 because of the rake.

Now let's say you have rakeback (or equivalent) of 30%, meaning, of course, that you get 30% of your rake given back to you. In this case you would get $1,500 back, which would only leave you down $3,500. This could obviously be a huge difference between being a losing player and breakeven, or breakeven and profitable. And if you are already a winning player, rakeback is just gravy. If you are a high volume player, you might as well be getting money back while you play.

Some might find it interesting and curious that the largest poker site in the world is one that technically does not offer rakeback. There are a lot of great reasons to play at PokerStars, however, those that don't play at PokerStars would argue that they can't get rakeback at Stars and they don't offer many deposit or reload bonuses, so why would I play there? That's where they are wrong. It is true that you can't get third party rakeback like you can at many other sites. However, PokerStars realizes that their valued regulars need to get some value for their precious time. This is where their VIP Club comes in.

PokerStars Rakeback has six levels to their VIP Club.

best rakeback deals