Rakeback has been the greatest of all poker bonuses for quite some time but it is actually slowing down. It might actually be the case that there is no real rakeback in a year or two. What is the reason for the disappearance of Rakeback? Poker Trend Watch looks in to the phenomenon.
We first need to know the history of Rakeback and there are lots of things you don’t know about it, let’s uncover some thruths. The first rakeback deal showed up in 2004 and it made a big impact, Rake The Rake is said to be first to launch and before then most people didn’t really think about the rake. The truth here is that the rake actually makes 90% of all players losing players.
Ok, a lot of the money goes to the 10% of players while playing dominoqq pkv that are the sharks at the room but an even larger chunk gets eaten by the room itself. In fact, it is such a large chunk that most people just rake their money away, no matter how good they are. Enter Rakeback.
Rakeback is nothing more fancy than cashback for poker, the difference is the high turnover of the chips in poker which makes the rakeback able to reach substaintial sums. For a long time poker rooms saw the rakeback as a way of discounting good players, players that rake a lot should get a discount, right? The secret here is that it’s not the high raking players that bring in the money to the room, they just rake away other peoples money.
None of the sharks that rake the most ever deposit money, or they do it once but they keep withdrawing a lot more. Several of them are poker pros and they’d have a rather horrible life it that meant they kept depositing. The players depositing a lot of money don’t actually rake that much. What they do is provide the room with rakeable money, the sharks will all get their share of it but a bigger piece of the pie will actually stay in the shape of rake.
This actually means that as a stand alone poker room or a poker network, rakeback isn’t really that great for you. You give a discount to your worst customers and attract even more of them. If you pit the sharks against a few scared fish you’ll actually get less rake than if you just let the fish bash it out.
There is also another inconvenience with rakeback, we call them rakeback affiliates. You know the site where you found your rakeback? The guy running it is actually not doing it for free. You can count on him getting 10% if you get 27%. That means that he’s actually getting 10% of your rake. This little discrepancy made a number of teenage boys (yup, most of the rakeback affiliates started out like that) very, very rich. The problem with the rakeback affiliate if you compare him with another affiliate is that he usually doesn’t provide the room with any value. He’s not sending you new players, just giving you your old ones back at a cost.
The third and maybe biggest problem is that Rakeback doesn’t work in a network. The reason is that it pays to get only sharks to your skin and let someone else deal with finding fish. A lot of small skins made a lot of money this way. Hooking up with Ongame and skimming off all the rake from Betsson or Bwin that spent a lot of money on getting fish to the tables. By just bringing in 50 high raking players you’d get all the rake while the ones that spent millions on getting lots of average players got ripped off. Ongame is a good example, they banned Rakeback early on with great fines for skins that would offer it.
Gambling is fun when you win money in return and people should know where to draw a line. Not everyone knows where to draw a line at gambling, leading to them losing excessive funds. Gambling should always be done with the additional cash and not the cash for the necessities like housing, food and clothing.
