What is Rakeback And How Can You Get It?
Professional online poker players know that rakeback is essential to a long-term winrate.
Rakeback is a rebate or refund of the rake taken by a poker room back to the player, usually by a third-party affiliate. Most poker rakeback deals refund a set percentage of all rake paid by the player.
For instance, if you pay $1,000 in rake over a given month, and have a 27% rakeback deal in place, you get $270 back.
Rakeback can raise your win rate dramatically, especially if you’re a high-volume online player.
Let’s take a look at what rakeback is, how you can get it, and the effect it can have on your profit as a poker player.
How Does Rakeback Work?
Upswing Poker Lab members get access to exclusive rakeback deals from VIP-Grinders, one of the most reputable rakeback sites in the industry. You can find some of the best rakeback deals available in the online poker world at VIP-Grinders.
You can click on this link to see all of the rakeback offers currently available for Upswing Members. The list covers numerous online poker sites.
No matter where you’re located and what online cardroom you play at, you’ll likely find a deal available at VIP-Grinders.
A few examples of some of those deals:
- Americas Cardroom: 27% Rakeback
- GGPoker: 60% Rakeback
- Betfair Poker: 35% Rakeback
Here’s how rakeback deals work at VIP-Grinders:
When you click the link above, you’ll be redirected to the VIP-Grinders homepage. You’ll see a menu of all of the different online poker rooms you can get a rakeback deal with through VIP-Grinders.
Each listing shows the poker room, the rakeback percentage, and any other perks you get for signing up.
New players can sign up for any of the poker rooms listed, and automatically qualify for the rakeback deal offered by a particular room.
In other words, if you’ve never signed up for an Americas Cardroom (ACR) account, you can sign up through the link on the VIP-Grinders page. The VIP-Grinders link will redirect you to ACR, and you complete the registration process from there.
Because you signed up through the VIP-Grinders link, you automatically qualify for rakeback earnings.
If you already have an existing account at a poker site, but still want to establish a rakeback deal at that site, contact VIP-Grinders. You might still be able to secure a rakeback deal.
How Is Rakeback Calculated?
To understand how rakeback is calculated, you first must understand how poker rake works.
Rake is the house cut taken by a poker room, which allows it to run as a profitable business. At an online poker room, rake is collected by the house in one of two ways:
- As a percentage of each cash game pot, depending on the size of the pot.
- As tournament fees or Sit N’ Go (SNG) fees.
For tournaments and SNGs, it’s pretty easy to calculate the amount of rake (and the amount of money you get back from rakeback).
When you play a tournament or SNG, you’ll see the buy-in listed as something like $100+$10 or $10+1.
The first number is the tournament buy-in, which is the amount that goes toward the prize pool. The second number is the tournament fee, or the rake.
The poker room takes rake from a cash game as a percentage of each pot, up to a predetermined cap. For example, the rake could be 5% of each pot, up to a $5 max.
Let’s say you play a hand where you and an opponent each put $50 in the pot. You win the pot, which is $100 before rake. You end up winning a $95 pot though, because the poker room takes 5% in rake.
Whether you play cash games, tournaments, or both, your rakeback deal determines the portion of the rake you get back.
Other Types Of Rakeback Deals
If you scroll through the VIP-Grinders site, you’ll see various other kinds of rakeback deals that don’t directly award rakeback as a percentage of the total rake you pay at the poker site.
Let’s take a look at a couple of examples:
- PokerStars: $600 Bonus, $30 Free, 65% VIP
- Partypoker: $400 Bonus, $40 Free Play, 60% VIP
In each of these cases, signing up through VIP-Grinders gets you a 100% deposit match bonus and a certain amount of free play. The “65% VIP” number for PokerStars refers to the maximum amount of rakeback you can get through PokerStars VIP program.
Deals like these don’t award any rakeback on top of what you get from racking up enough rake to qualify for PokerStars VIP tiers.
For deals that don’t have a direct rakeback percentage advertised, be sure to talk to your VIP-Grinders representative about how these deals work.
The Effect of Rakeback
Rakeback can make a huge difference on your bottom line if you’re playing poker for profit (which we all are).
Online poker pros can earn significant real money on rakeback. The best of the best in poker can open multiple poker tables at the same time, win at an elite rate, and also earn big with rakeback deals in place.
Consider this graph that tracks the play of Upswing Poker coach Tim Jenkins:
Rakeback more than doubled this poker pro’s profit over 100,000 hands.
Compare the green line to the blue line in this graph. The green line is Tim’s profit without rakeback. The purple line is Tim’s profit with rakeback, and it’s double the amount of the green line.
To put it another way – if Tim was a breakeven player over the span of this graph, he’d still make $48,028 in profit just on rakeback.
We can’t state this enough – you’re missing out on free money if you play online poker and don’t have a rakeback deal in place.
Whether you’re a top-tier high-stakes player, or an aspiring grinder trying to build a bankroll, the time to visit VIP-Grinders is now!
