Professional online poker players know that rakeback can be vital to long term sustainability in the game.
If you want to make enough money at online poker to call it a profession, having a rakeback deals in place at every possible poker site will make your life significantly easier.
Rakeback is a rewards program that pays back a player with a percentage of table rake. For example, if you have a 25% rakeback deal in place, you’ll see 25% of all of the rake you pay get put back into your account. So if you pay $100 in rake, you’ll receive $25 back.
Whether you’re a poker pro or you just want to maximize your profit at the online tables, you need to establish rakeback deals whenever possible. As you can probably imagine, high-volume online players make massive amounts of money through rakeback deals.
To help Upswing Poker members and readers find rakeback deals, we’ve made VIP Grinders our recommended rakeback provider.
VIP Grinders has been in the rakeback business for many years. It’s run by passionate online poker professionals and their website serves as a multi network and multi affiliate tier tracking, reporting and payment back office.
Their goal is to provide our poker players with a full suite of rakeback deals.
Check out VIP Grinders rakeback deals here >
Poker table rake is the percentage of money taken by the house in a poker game. Rake is an essential part of a poker operator’s business model, as it allows online poker rooms to run as a profitable business, while giving players the opportunity to play (and hopefully win) at poker.
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.
For tournaments, you’ll see that the entry fee is always listed as something like $50+5 or $200+$20. The first number in that listing is the tournament entry fee, which goes to the prize pool. The second number is the rake taken by the house.
Rake can really add up if you play high-volume poker. Luckily for us, the rakeback can also pile up, adding to our win rate significantly.
Rakeback deals can award money back to the player in many forms. The most common type of rakeback deals pays a player back a give percentage of all rake.
For instance, if you amassed $1,000 in rake over the course of a week, a 36% rakeback deal would put $360 of that rake back into your account.
To visualize just how much of an impact rakeback can have, let’s take a look at a graph from Upswing’s resident mid-stakes, high-volume cash game crusher 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.
VIP Grinders offers Upswing Lab members rakeback deals on many of the world’s top online poker sites, including:
And many, many more. Upswing Poker members and readers can click here to see all of the rakeback deals available through VIP Grinders. You can make as much as 70% rakeback with some of the deals.
Online poker is still profitable in 2024, but to unlock the true potential of your win rate, you must have rakeback deals in place!
Want to learn how to adjust your strategy based on the rake in your games? Check out this article.
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