Poker rakeback, the background
To understand poker rakeback you must first have a good grasp of what rake is. And no, I'm not talking about the kind of rake that spends all of his money on wine, women, and gambling.
The word rake as it pertains to poker refers to the fee a poker room (both online and offline) charges for hosting a game. In a Las Vegas casino you might see as much as 10 percent of each hand going to the rake. Online poker rooms generally charge up to half of that, 5 percent. The online rake is usually capped at $3 or $5. You will see a bigger variation for this amount in a brick-and-mortar casino.
When you think about it, it is only natural that poker rooms have implemented the rake. Unlike many other casino games, a poker player does not wager against the house but rather against other poker players. The rake is simply how a poker room generates revenues.
As a side note, the word rake itself comes from the fact that the dealer in a live poker game actually rakes the poker chips that make up the rake towards her or himself.
As you probably have guessed already, rakeback has to do with getting part the rake you have paid back. Rakeback is strictly an online phenomenon and it can be seen as a result of the stiff competition among online poker rooms.
The rake that online poker rooms charge has traditionally been based on the rake charged by brick-and-mortar poker rooms. The problem with this is that an online poker room has much lower overhead cost per poker hand played (no dealers and no expensive casino building to support) than a regular poker room. To add to this, poker hands online are played much quicker than in a casino.
As a consequence of this Party Poker, Full Tilt and its competitors have so far had very good profit margins. But to be able to attract new players or even steal some from competing sites many online poker rooms have now started to accept a lower margin by giving some of the rake back to the players. It is not uncommon to see a room give a third of the rake back to its players.
Since paying full rake can sometimes mean the difference between being a winning or a losing poker player it is not surprising to see that more and more players are turning to rakeback.
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