Rake Back Pros and Cons

Internet poker sites want your business. There are plenty of people interested in playing poker online, and for awhile, there were plenty of sites to go around. Today there are so many poker sites and poker affiliate sites that some are starting to offer rake back programs in order to solicit your business.

A rake back program is one that offers to give you back some of the money that you give the site in order to play there. Each site takes a rake out of every pot that is dealt. The rake, a percentage of the amount in the pot of anywhere from one to five percent, is how the sites make their money. A rake back program returns some of that rake money to the players. The most common way to get rake back is through an affiliate poker site that offers a portal to various Internet poker sites. When you sign on to a new poker site using the affiliate, you qualify for rake back. The percentage of rake back you get is determined by the affiliate site you use and the amount of time you play there.

Rake Back Pros:

There is one very obvious pro to rake back and that is that you are getting free money. You may feel that the rake taken out of each pot is such a small amount that it is not a big deal, especially since you are not paying unless you win the pot. In reality, you are contributing to every rake for every hand you play, and if you assume (correctly) that your value in poker comes from the extra bets you win and not the fact that you are winning more pots than everyone else, you will realize just how important rake back becomes.

Rake Back Cons:

The first negative of rake back is simply that not all poker sites accept rake back deals. Also, you can only get a rake back deal using a new account. If you are already signed up with a particular site, you are not eligible. Also, many affiliates do not let you combine rake back deals and online poker bonuses, so if you are working on a bonus, you will not get rake credit for that time spent playing.

On the whole, the pros of getting money back for playing poker far outweigh the cons, so if you have the opportunity to get a rake back deal, you should definitely look into it. It could change the way you look at online poker forever.

If you’re looking for a great rake back deal, Rakebrain.com is the place to go. At Rakebrain.com you can find rake back offers from all the major poker rooms, rake back calculators and lots of other useful information about rake back.