What is Rakeback?

If you have ever played Hold'em poker, you will have noticed that the house takes a cut of almost every hand. The money they take is called the rake and is how they make their money. You can look at it as the poker site’s commission for letting you play there.

Understanding the House Rake

There are only a couple situations that the house doesn’t take rake. When you play a tournament or sit n go, you will notice that there’s the buy in amount plus some other amount. The amount that you have to pay in addition to the actual buy in is the rake. For example, if you play in a tournament and the buy in is $200+20, the rake is $20.

You may not realize just how much the rake accumulates unless you pay close attention to it. The average rake is 5% with a cap of $3, which means that the poker room won’t take more than $3 per hand. If you play any kind of high stakes poker that means that the house is taking $3 from the pot every hand.

To put that in perspective, if there are nine people at your table and you are the dealer, by the time you’re dealer again, the house could have raked $27. When you play poker, you are most likely there long enough to have been the dealer more times than you can remember. That means the house is taking a huge portion of your possible winnings, but now you can get a portion of that money back.

Some poker site’s are now offering rakeback, which means you can get a percentage of the house's rake back. What rakeback does is give you back a percentage of the money you contributed to the rake. The most common percentage to be offered is 30%, but some offer more and some offer less.

If you play much poker, you can easily get a couple hundred extra dollars back when playing under rakeback. Some of the players that play very often and very high limits can make up to $3,000 or more per month with rakeback. There is no limit to the amount of rakeback you can receive.

How Rakeback Works

On most sites’, to get rakeback, you must sign up through an affiliate site. Once you do that, you can start playing poker with the rakeback offer. That means that at the end of every month, they will give you back a percentage of the rake they took from you. The way they calculate the amount of rake they took from you at a cash table is from how much you put into the hand.

If you contributed 50% of the pot and the rake was $3, the rake they took from you would be about $1.50. If that site offers a 30% rakeback, you would get 30% of $1.50 back, which is 45 cents. That may not seem like a lot, but when you add that up for every hand you contribute to the pot, it comes out to a nice amount of money.

The rakeback also applies to the fee you pay in sit n go's and tournaments. So if you play a $200+20 tournament and the site offers 30% back, you would get 30% of $20 back, which is $6. You see how you can easily get a couple hundred extra dollars back each month just by signing up for the rakeback offer.

Start Earning Rakeback!

If you would like to start earning rakeback, then head over to our PKR rakeback page for all the details. We are offering a special 30% rakeback offer to all players as well as a bonus of up to $2,000.