What is a Rake / Rakeback ? For each hand of poker played you pay a small amount of the pot to the poker room to cover there costs and also to line their pockets, but some poker rooms offer you a part of this back!

It is this charge which is referred to as rakeback and you will be charged this whether you play at an online poker room or a real poker table. The rake is usually somewhere between 0-5% of the total pot, and a lot of poker rooms have a maximum rake of £2-5 which gets taken by the house automatically as the game progresses.

What is a rakeback?

Some poker rooms offer to pay you back a part of your rake contribution into your account at certain intervals, usually once a month. This rakeback amount varies depending on how many hands you have played and also at what table limit you were playing, so for example the rakeback from a £5-10 table will be a lot more than that from a £0.50-1 table assuming you play the same number of hands at each. The rakeback percentage can be anywhere between 20-60% of your total rake contribution, so if you play quite a lot of games we could be talking a few hundred £’s every month, which is a very nice little bonus.

The rake is calculated as follows. Let us take a Texas Hold’em game as an example, the blind bets are £2-4 which means that the rake will typically be about £0.75 per round, assuming there is some betting. Your contribution to this rake is this amount divided by the number of players at the table. So in a 10 player table your average contribution would be £0.07 per hand. Let us then say that you play 200 hands per day which means that you would be paying £14 per day in rake. If the poker room is offering a 35 % rakeback then that equates to £5 per day given back to you by the poker room, not bad !!