BCO Games - Security and Online Gambling

The poker rake and rakeback

Learning how the poker rake is collected will not only help you understand exactly how and to what extent rakeback can help you, it’ll also help you choose your rakeback deals better.

When they first learn about rakeback, some (if not most) beginners just go: I’m a micro limit player and I don’t think I generate any rake anyways since I seldom ever win a hand. It’s probably because of when the rake is taken that most beginners figure it is always paid by the winner.
The pot is filled and the winner takes it down. The room then rakes it and ships the chips his way, right? Wrong. That’s not how it works at all.

The pot is filled up indeed, but it does not belong to the winner, or to anyone else at the table for that matter. The pot is always an independent entity at the table. You may have a share in it, but it’s not something any of the players control until after it’s been raked and awarded to the winner. The keyword here is “share”. Everyone who’s put money into the pot has a share in it, which means that everyone who’s put money into the pot pays rake, and to further elaborate on the idea: everyone who pays rake will earn rake back, provided he/she has signed up for a deal.

If you think that’s interesting, wait till you get a load of this: in some poker rooms, you don’t even have to actually contribute to the pot to be considered a rake contributor and thus to be eligible for rakeback.
Take the Full Tilt rakeback for instance. It may be only 27% (which is not exactly generous compared to some of the other available deals) but it carries good value because Full Tilt uses the dealt rake method to calculate your individual rake contribution. This means you’ll be producing rake and rakeback too (provided you read about before you commit and you sign up to rakeback) every time you get pocket cards. You don’t actually have to put money into the pot in any shape or form.

Other poker rooms use the contributed rake method which only credits rake contribution (and therefore rakeback too) to players who actually put money into the pot.

Still other poker rooms use the weighted contributed rake method which takes the amount of your contribution into account as well.