The Player Club

With jargon-heavy terms such as flop, blind and river, it can be difficult enough for any newcomer to poker to get to grips with the nuances of the games. With the average online casino also offering rake to players, it is vital for new players to understand exactly what rake means and how it is applied in the variants of poker found on any casino provider.

Rake is basically a percentage of money that is taken from the pot to furnish the house with a fee for each game. As poker is a community game – i.e., a game where players bet against each other rather than the house – the house uses rake to earn its percentage for organizing and monitoring these community games.

Rakeback is a further percentage of the rake that is given back to players once they have finished a session. This amount is dependant on the casino – some will take a small rake while others will take much more. Some casinos

charge rake on the number of players in a round, others merely take a final percentage of the pot. Again, it depends on the casino, the table and the stakes, so it is always worth checking the rake first, either with the casinos themselves or with a casino comparison site that offers reviews that include things like rake detail.

Furthermore, while the concept of rakeback might seem like an immediately appealing one (essentially cutting in on a free house percentage) there may be conditions to which the rakeback adheres. A frequent example of this is when a casino offers bonuses and promotions that are only available to players that do not collect rakeback. Other sites might subtract any bonuses from the net rake, thus cheapening the rakeback.

All of the relevant information is freely available, either on the website of the relevant casino or on any affiliate site, and quite often these affiliate sites offer promotional codes whereby negotiating the best rakeback conditions. For this reason it is often a clever tactic to browse the affiliate sites when first choosing an online casino, thus earning a larger rake or more access to net rake through bonuses.

When all is said and done rakeback is one of the more consistent casino bonuses that are available to players. Providing they take the time and effort to analyze the best opportunities for themselves, they could find that the more poker they play the more they earn, whether they win the pot or not.