How is My Rakeback Calculated?

What is Rakeback?

Rakeback is the newest innovation in online poker room bonuses, and a great way for you to increase your profits when playing online poker. The way rakeback works is simple. Online poker rooms take a percentage, or rake, of money out of each pot that is played on their site. This rake, which is about five percent or $4 out of the pot, whichever is less, is how the online casino makes its money. Online poker rakeback returns some of that money to you, the player.

How Does Rakeback Work?

When you sign-up with a new poker site through a rakeback program, that poker site returns some of the rake you generate back into your account. This effectively reduces the amount you are paying the online casino to play on their site, thereby increasing your win rate.

How is My Rakeback Calculated?

The problem you may see with rakeback is that the rake is taken out of every pot, and you do not win every pot. Furthermore, there is no way to know how many pots you will win in a given session, and if there were some way to only return the rake based on the raked pots you won, players who win many small pots would be penalized more than players who win a few big ones. The reality is that you pay rake for every hand you play, since the money that is raked doesn’t belong to anyone else until it is won. Additionally, you count on the pots you win to cover the amounts you may have invested in other pots that you did not win. So how does the online casino calculate your rakeback?

The online poker site will generate an individual rake contribution based on the amount you play and/or the amount you contribute to the pots, whether you win the pot or not. There are two ways online poker rooms calculate this individual rate contribution.

One way to calculate rakeback is the shared method, used by Cake Poker rakeback program for instance. In the shared method, all players are considered to contribute to the pot equally, whether they played the hand or not. As long as you are dealt in, you are considered to have paid rake. If $4 of rake came out of a pot in a ten-handed game where everyone was dealt in, each player is considered to have contributed forty cents of rake.

The other way a poker room can calculate rake is the contributed method. In the contributed method, the rake is calculated based on how much you have contributed to a particular pot. If a pot was worth $60, and you put $20 in that pot, you would be credited with $1 of rake, whether you win the pot or not (assuming a five percent rake of $3).

Most rakeback programs offer a rakeback of 30 percent, so you should be looking to get at least this much before signing up, although it may be possible to get even more. Remember that the more tables and the more often you play, the more rakeback you’ll get, providing you do all your play on a site where you signed up through a rakeback program.