What is Rakeback?
To have a clear picture of what rakeback is all about you first have to understand how poker rooms generate revenue. They do this by charging a rake – a portion of real money that the poker players bet against each other. Since in poker players do not bet against the house, the rake is virtually the only way that poker rooms can get money from the table. It is quite similar to an entry fee that the player has to pay before taking part in any playing activity in this particular poker room.
The rake is not paid directly by players though. It is usually taken in the form of a micro payment from each pot placed on the table. Online poker rooms usually charge the same average 5% from the pot just like typical land based casinos do. And the rake itself can range from one cent to a few dollars depending on the amount of the pot at the table.
Rakeback allows the player to save a portion of his/her poker money. There are different online systems that allow users to keep track of their online poker rakeback at a single account and manage their money effectively. Such systems usually have agreements with online poker rooms you prefer to play in and all the data and statistics are saved onto your account so you could easily calculate the rakeback when you need to. Typical for most such systems the rakeback is paid out once a month on a particular date set by each system individually.
There are numerous sites where you can find the rakeback calculator – a very useful tool that allows you to calculate the online poker rakeback according to your playing statistics and show you how much money you could save if using rakeback.
You will see that some online poker rooms show the overall amount of the rake from the current pot. However, you won't see anywhere your personal rake. This individual rake is stored at the online poker room's backend, and the rakeback you will be given is based namely on this data. In general, there are two main methods the poker rooms calculate your individual rakeback to be given out: shared and contributed.
The shared method is pretty simple, because the rake at the table is divided evenly among the players at that table. That is, if the total rake at the table is $10 and there are five players at the table, each player's individual rake will be $2.
When the contributed method is applied, players are contributing money to the pot and get assigned with an individual rake. There's a different rake for each player calculated according to his or her contribution to the pot. That is, if you have given $50 to a pot of $150 and the overall rake was $3, you get a $1 rake.
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