When you play Roulette either online or at a live casino you will notice that there is a zero number on the table. USA players will note there is a zero and double zero on the roulette wheel as this increases the casinos edge. This is called the house edge because the payouts are not a true reflection on the odds of hitting your ball therefore over time you will lose overall. This all but guarantees the casinos profitability. This of flipping a coin, you have a 50% chance of getting either heads or tails. If there was a third side, a very small that had a 1% possibility of hitting, in the long term you would lose flipping coins.

In poker, the “house edge” is the rake. Rake is the fee the poker room charges to each player in a cash game or poker tournament to play at the site. If you win as exactly the same amount of money as you lose when you play poker, because you pay rake you will be losing money.

Poker rooms fight hard to attract and keep new players by developing great poker software and offering good sign-up bonuses. Affiliates are paid money to refer players to the site and some of the clever affiliates realised one way to get a player to sign up to a site through them rather than an affiliate competitor was to give them some of their rake back. Thus, Rakeback was born. The poker rooms pay the affiliate a percentage of the rake generated by the player and the affiliate returns a large amount to the player minus a small amount for them. Players therefore received a percentage of the rake they pay back in the way of kickbacks from their affiliate. The affiliate makes money and the player makes money, everyone wins!

High volume players are known to use rakeback as their wage and any profits as bonuses. They can calculate what their monthly rakeback will be because of the amount of hours and tables they play. For a long term break even player, this can almost be a stable income!

When poker rakeback goes wrong it can, however, look really bad for the poker room where players are affected. The rakeback sites are not connected to the poker rooms so if they did stop paying rake to the players the poker room is then besieged with complaints when they can do nothing to help. It is the player’s choice on choosing rakeback providers and although unfortunate, the poker rooms cannot be held responsible for any problems. Despite this the poker rooms reputation can suffer and many poker rooms are uneasy about relying on third parties to maintain their integrity.

Poker rooms like bwin.com decided that they would prefer to be in control of their own player reward programs. If you follow the bwin poker blog you will see that their players who earned a large amount of VIP points when playing at bwin had a chance to use those points (if they had earned enough to cover the buy in) to enter satellites to win packages to the Aussie Millions tournament in 2010. Their poker blog will report on how these players progress at the tournament in a couple of weeks.

When you use a loyalty program you get site specific benefits that can sometimes be better value than cash payments. Even though you do not get cash payments from a rakeback provider you have the security of knowing that your reputable poker room is handling your VIP points and rewards program. It is up to you to decide whether you want that or you would prefer to use the rakeback type system. Both have their benefits.

Paying rake to a poker room is a reality of playing online poker. There is no way to avoid it but fortunately poker rooms like bwin poker are happy to offer loyalty programs where the effect of the rake to your bankroll is reduced through their loyalty bonuses and offers. You cannot expect to play poker for free, but luckily the poker rooms like bwin appreciate your business so much they offer perks to their players. All you must do now is become a winning player as although these perks are great they should not be the difference between you winning and losing at the poker tables.

By Malcolm Clarke

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