BEST ONLINE POKER GUIDE

There are many rakeback offers to choose from, and it can sometimes be hard to find the best deal. A recommendation is to look for an affiliate with good reputation, actually most of them are serious, but it has happened that players didn't get the money they were supposed to. To be on the safe side, choose one of the big rake back sites.

Secondly, look for the best rake back offer. You want to get as high percentage rakeback as possible. One site that is both a serious business, where you can be sure your money is safe, and also offers really good rakeback, is RakeBrain. We strongly recommend them, you will get your money in time, and the pay out is highest in the industry. Have a look at their grate offers:

• Absolute Poker Rakeback
• Full Tilt Poker Rakeback
• Sun Poker Rakeback.
• Ultimate Bet Rakeback
• Inter Poker Rakeback
• Nine.com Rakeback
• Crazy Poker Rakeback
• CelebPoker Rakeback
• Fortune Poker Rakeback
• BetOnBet Rakeback

When you play poker in a poker room, a small fee is "scraped off" each pot. It is called the rake. Poker rooms make their profits from the rake.

In an individual pot, the rake is often so small that you won't even notice it. If you put $10 in the pot and lose, you've lost $10 - rake or no rake. If you put in $10 and win, for example, $25, then you may not miss the $1 rake that much.

Nevertheless, as you play hundreds or thousands of hands over time, these small amounts of rake add up to considerable amounts. This is where the idea of rakeback comes in.

The percentage of each pot that is raked varies from poker room to poker room and between tables with different blind levels. Commonly, the rake is around 5%, meaning that from each pot 5% is taken off in rake. Very small pots may be rake free, and for big pots the rake is usually limited to a fixed maximum amount, for example, $1 or $3 depending on the blind size.

In the end, as a low-limit player you tend to pay a larger percentage of your bets to the rake than as a high limit player. On the other hand, the higher limits you play the more rake you pay, seen in dollars and cents. Either way, with a rakeback program you will be able to keep more of your winnings.

In order to reward loyal players, and to keep them as customers, poker rooms may offer you a rakeback deal, or rakeback program. This means that you will get back a certain percentage of the rake you have paid while playing in the poker room.

To calculate your rakeback, the poker room first calculates how much rake you have contributed with. This can be done in different ways. One way is described below.

Let's say, for example, that you put $10 in a $35 pot that generates a rake of $1.75. Your percentage of the pot is 10/35 = 28.6%. As a consequence, your rake contribution in this pot is 28.6% of $1.75, that is, $0.50.

Your rakeback is then calculated as a percentage of your rake contribution. If you have, for example, a rakeback deal of 30%, from this particular pot you would get back 30% of $0.50, that is, $0.15.

This may seem like a negligible amount of money, but then again, your total rakeback will be the sum of hundreds or thousands of such small amounts.

Apart from rakeback, a common way for poker rooms to reward persistent players is to offer various kinds of bonuses. For example, players that deposit new money may get a percentage of the deposit as a bonus. Numbers from 25% to 100% are common.

To qualify for, or clear, the bonus, players usually have to play a certain number of hands in the poker room. When compared to rakeback, bonuses often return larger amounts for each hand played. In that way, a bonus may be worth more than a rakeback deal.

On the other hand, bonuses might not come around all that often. Players who wish to be constantly playing under bonus conditions will find themselves jumping from poker room to poker room, going through the trouble of moving cash from A to B every time there is a new bonus to hunt down.

Usually, bonuses must be cleared within a restricted time period, which might cause some stress for the players. With a rakeback deal you get your percentage all the time, every single hand, no matter if you play a little or a lot.

If you play in a certain poker room only when there is a bonus to clear, and then move to another room to clear another bonus, the poker rooms may regard this as a kind of abuse. When they catch such a "bonus whore", they may very well freeze the account. This is another advantage of rakeback compared to bonuses.

Having a rakeback deal doesn't prevent your profiting from bonus offers from the same poker room. If you have a rakeback deal and join, for example, a re-load bonus program, when the bonus amount has been paid out to you, it will be subtracted from your total rake before your rakeback is calculated.

For example, if you have a 25% rakeback deal with a poker room and pay $1000 of rake during a month, normally you would get $250 in rakeback. But, if during this period you receive a $200 re-load bonus, your total rake is reduced to $800 and your rakeback is $200.