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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PRIMARY POKER SKILLS

But yet one of the primary skills in any form of hold’em poker is in how you handle post flop play. In no-limit hold’em, most of the time you will not go beyond the flop so post flop skills are not required as often. But in games where big bets cannot win the pot immediately like with pot limit and especially limit play then you have to be able to play very well after the flop.

While you cannot lose your buy-in in one foul swoop in limit play, your level of skill will be under constant bombardment by having to see flop after flop after flop. This will be even more pronounced in six handed play. Let us look at an example to show what I mean here.

It has been folded around to the button who raises, the small blind folds and you are in the big blind with the hand Qh-5c. Now if this was a no-limit situation then you can clearly fold and wait for a better opportunity as Qh-5c isn’t exactly one of the better poker hands. In fact even if your opponent on the button is a very loose and aggressive player then folding would still be correct here. Even though you would be looking to open your range, it wouldn’t be opened wide enough to incorporate a hand like Q-5.

LIMIT PLAY IS DIFFERENT

But in limit play then you really must play this hand. Your pot odds and implied odds coupled with your opponents likely range gives you a straight forward call here. In fact to balance your play somewhat then you can even consider throwing in a small percentage of re-raises although that percentage cannot be very high with a hand like Q-5.

Your opponent could have something like K-9 but yet pot odds of 3.5/1 dictate that you simply cannot fold this hand. Then you can decide how to proceed on certain types of flop. For example if the flop came J-7-2 rainbow then you may get the opportunity to take the lead here on a ragged rainbow board that has likely missed your opponent.

You could try leading out or maybe check-raising for balance. You have reached this situation purely because you were playing a form of poker where you were receiving good pot odds to get involved before the flop.

Poor post flop play at limit hold’em is like a slow bleeding of money and this is why having a rakeback deal is critical these days to your hourly rate. The overall level of skill in limit play has led to variance becoming more and more of an issue.

This is precisely why I stopped playing the game and switched to no-limit play via a brief fling with SNG’s. But do not let anyone tell you that limit hold’em is a far less skilful game than no-limit because anyone who says that simply does not understand limit hold’em.

This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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I have a question, it’s something about what happened to me in a no limit game online. I’m actually heads up and by the river, there is an A high straight up on the table. Well, there aren’t three card to a flush, therefore the nuts are still on. Then, my opponent called for a check so I go all in. Suddenly, he made a call and we divided the pot.

After that, I received a message from that player telling me that what I did just increased the rake so the casino ended up making more than we do. Well, I believe I did the right thing for it was a split pot and we are in a low limit type of game.

Any comment about what happened?

Thanks!
Norman
Norman,

Your opponent was saying that there wasn’t any reason to bet since there is an ace high straight on the board. He is correct. You basically increased the pot and gave the card room more money. When a nut hand is on the board, betting will usually only put money in the casino’s pocket. There isn’t any point to it.

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I would like to ask something. If in the event you’re holding the games at your house with all of your equipments being used up, is it wrong to take $5 off as a sort fee or the like? Let’s say for example, a small fee for the house or equipment maintenance or expenses.

Thanks!
Bryant
Bryant,

Legally, you aren’t supposed to do this. Only casinos are legally allowed to charge a fee or rake. However, if all players agree to this, I see no problem with it personally. One guy I know has a “Tip Jar” where he has people put money in to go towards his games. You may want to use that.

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