Rakeback and Online Poker and 5 Online Truths

5 Online Poker Rakeback Pitfalls You Must Avoid

It’s only natural that poker players tend to sign up with rakeback providers that offer the highest percentages. However, a large number of them are beginning to find out the hard way that percentages alone aren’t the best basis to choose the best rakeback provider. There are at least five things you must consider when searching the web for a rakeback provider. Here they are:

The numbers involved are not small, so make sure you search carefully.

Though numbers don’t lie, it’s amazing just how many of the “best” rakeback providers are actually bad customers. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of money involved in this game of numbers and it’s not easy to identify the truth at first hand. “Best” typically being relative to who? It’s hard to argue with that, but if you’re looking at getting the most back from the source, rather than what’s being offered, then you have to make sure you search a little deeper.

Whatever you do, don’t settle. You want to play with the best rakeback provider, not the worst one! Though sites like eWalletXpress offer some wonderful benefits of being pay per hand, they too are a fair bit of money behind the system in a lot of different ways. Just because the poker sites want your business, doesn’t mean they always have your best interests at heart. Ask yourself these questions, and only deal with the best ways to get rakeback if you need it, then you can both win and lose on your rakeback in a fair and happy way.

So, what percentage is made from rakeback?

The percentage of rakeback paid out by sites is typically a little over 50%. Since most websites take a rake percentage of up to 48%, the rakeback percentage should be around 52 or 53%. However, many websites that take a high percentage of rake (read: high dollar amounts) are much lower than 52 or 53% overall, meaning you’ll be losing more money to the rake than you’d like if you goal is to make the most money.

The truth is, you shouldn’t be betting high numbers each hand, if you want to make the most money you can from your rakeback deal. You want to be betting around 25/1 to 30/1, depending on your desired level of play. When you’re consistently betting between 25 and 30 units for each hand, the money you ultimately win from rake is going to be quite small, because of the high amounts you’re playing to win. Also, because you’re betting less than 50% of your limit, when you do lose a hand, you lose a lot, and it can cost you quite a lot of your bankroll.

What else do I need to know about rakeback?

It’s helpful to understand the purpose of bonuses, but don’t get caught up in them. Bonuses are great rewards to attract players to your poker site, but often they are completely useless when it comes to profit. Sure, you can extract a nice chunk out of a bonus, but anything you can do to improve your odds will have a negative ROI, and anything you can do to improve your odds will have a negative ROI. Understanding this will be the first step to making money as a poker player.

The last thing you want to understand about rakeback is that it’s an incentive…It’s not a guarantee of your winning. Your winning is dependent on your skill, your betting decisions, your play and more.

In that sense, if you understand these two elements, you will ultimately be profitable as a poker player, because you will have won or not lost as much as you could, given your available capital, in situations where you actually had the best hand or had the best see-saw, and didn’t win.

How much capital is available to you as a poker player who wants to make some money with poker?

The short answer is:

Your available bankroll is your bankroll…and the more you have, the more you can make, provided you choose carefully.

The available bankroll, for this reason, is like an umbrella term for all the money you have at your disposal to play Vegas88. This amount could be $500 for a $100 buy-in game, or it could be $3,000 for a $300 buy-in + multiplier game.

For example, if you have $500 to spend playing online poker and you want to win $100, you can do so with a $300 buy-in, or you can spend $500 playing a $100 buy-in game.

The only time you’ll spend more than $500 is when you multi-table.

Multi-tabling is your most powerful form of earning rakeback at online poker.