1. Money returned by a poker affiliate to the poker player who generated the rake in the first place.

Rakeback Calculator

How Rakeback Works

Rakeback only grew along with the poker boom, especially as high volume grinders could be profitable players even if their pre-rakeback play was slightly negative. Sites like RaketheRake, Rakemeback, and RakeBrain became very popular rakeback sites. Your rakeback is determined by this number minus deductions which includes bonuses and cash-based promotions such as the Monthly Points Race. The Rakeback reporting tool is located in the “Rewards” tab within the Poker Lobby. Rakeback payments are made every Wednesday for rake generated during the previous Monday through Sunday period. Rakeback Calculator. The amount of rakeback that you receive depends on a number of different factors. The two key factors are your rakeback percentage and your gross rake generated. RakeMeBack can help you estimate how much rake you generate and subsequently how much rakeback you are entitled to. Following our recommendation, he started to play Full Ring Cash Games on Tigergaming (Chico Network). He is playing now between 8 to 10 tables (NL25–200) for a total volume of 50k hands per month. He is making more than 1k in Rakeback monthly. Thanks to a softer competition, he is also clearly beating the games pre rakeback.”. Rakeback comes in the form of a rebate most often directly passed from an online poker site to its players. In the past affiliates would be given the funds to distribute to players, but some unscrupulous affiliates ran off with the money and after a few years that practice all but ceased.

Virtually every poker room employs affiliates who help to market the poker room on websites, in magazines, and elsewhere. One payment option for affiliates is known as MGR, or Monthly Gross Revenue. Essentially, MGR gives the affiliate a percentage interest in the rake generated by players who sign up with the affiliate's tracking code. Rakeback emerged from competing affiliates who were being paid by the MGR method. Those affiliates decided to return a sizable percentage of the money they were being paid back to players. Thus, the rakeback industry was born.

Which Affiliate Can I Trust?

PokerTerms has a close working relationship with the rakeback affiliates at This Is The Nuts (TITN). TITN has been around for years, they know the industry, they pay quickly, and they run great promotions. In fact, TITN runs over $100k in monthly promotions. Add that to features like daily stat updates, a MyTITN page, 24/7 phone/chat/email support and much more, TITN is our #1 choice for poker rakeback.

That being said, any of the big rakeback affiliates are generally trustworthy enough to pay you your rakeback. The differentiating factor in today's rakeback environment is generally factors not related to trust (ie, promotions, support, etc).

Rooms That Allow Rakeback

The most popular room that openly allows rakeback is Full Tilt Poker. Other top poker sites that allow rakeback are Absolute Poker/UB.com (both part of the CEREUS network) and Cake Poker. A whole host of other rooms also allow players to sign up with rakeback.

Some rooms, such as Bodog Poker, allow rakeback, but prefer to avoid wide-scale promotion of their program. You can find Bodog rakeback at most of the top rakeback providers if you simply create a free account and login.

Rakeback Americas Cardroom

Rooms That Don't Allow Rakeback

The largest poker room in the world, PokerStars, is strictly against offering rakeback to players. Instead, PokerStars offers a lucrative and well-run VIP program. Within the confines of the PokerStars VIP program, top raking players can earn upwards of 50% of their rake back in various players rewards. To many, the PokerStars VIP program is effectively the same as rakeback, although in a different form. Top PokerStars players can also opt to turn their Frequent Player Points (FPPs) into cash, which makes the PokerStars VIP program even more similar to rakeback.

In addition to PokerStars, top non-US rooms such as Party Poker, OnGame (PokerRoom, bwin) and iPoker (Titan Poker, CDPoker) do not allow rakeback to be offered to players.

Here is more info about poker loyalty programs.

Rakeback Percentages

At all of the major poker rooms offering rakeback, affiliates must agree to a certain capped percentage that is allowed to be returned to the player. Some poker room rakeback percentages include:

Full Tilt Poker: 27%.
Cake Poker: 33%.
Absolute Poker/UB.com: 30%.
Action Poker: 35%.
Carbon Poker: 30%.
Sun Poker: 30%.

Rakeback Bovada

As you can see, the maximum allowed rakeback percentages are typically in the upper 20s to mid 30s. However, at some smaller rooms, it is possible to receive over 50% rakeback. Most online poker players consider Full Tilt Poker and Cake Poker to be the best poker rooms that offer rakeback due to the combination of good action and generous promotions.

Related Terms

Rake, Poker Loyalty Programs

In order to understand what rakeback is, you would need to understand how poker rooms earn their revenue or earn their funds in online poker. Whether it is a tournament or a cash game, the poker rooms would take some part of the buy-in fees. For the most part, the poker rooms would take 5% of the revenue from each pot in cash games. This fee is referred to as the “rake” and a majority of players do not even notice the process. As a matter of fact, poker rooms make large sums of money from these percentages, which turn out to be a great revenue stream in the long run. Besides revenue, popular online poker sites make millions of dollars as “profit” from the tables itself. Its very different from the revenue model of casinos online which earn money not from rake but from when the player loses against the house.

Rakeback in Online Poker and Promotionals

Lately, rakeback has now turned into an exciting promotional scheme for the affiliates referring and recruiting players to poker rooms. As soon as you sign up for rakeback on a poker site, you would receive a percentage of the rake generated by the poker room. Hence the process is called a “rakeback” process.

Rakeback Betonline

In most cases, the rakeback figure is about 30%. Hence, from the 5% amount generated by the poker rooms from the pot, they would give back 30% to the players as a part of the “rakeback” figure. At the same time as this may not seem to be significant amount, but once you play poker for a longer period of time, it turns out to be a big amount. A majority of professional players make around $50,000 a year, from rakeback alone, besides the profits they make while playing poker. In order to claim the rakeback, you don’t really have to be a regular player. It has been observed that low limit players with a bankroll of merely $100, can also make about $1000 a year, simply by playing on smaller stakes cash tables.

Nowadays when online poker is not legal in USA, there is questions about if rakeback will return even if online poker gets legal again. Rakeback deals in Europe are not that common anymore for example. So new poker rooms has rakeback promotions, otherwise it’s back to poker bonus in many cases.

The interesting part about rakeback is the secrecy that surrounds the phenomenon. Prominent players already know the fact that poker sites do not advertise or promote rakeback schemes to the players to register with them directly.