Poker rakeback and the sign-up bonus

 
Everybody knows about sign-up bonuses, and many online players are also familiar with the term: bonus whoring or bonus hunting. It is rather amazing then how few of these same people know about rakeback.

Rakeback is a form of loyalty reward, which – unlike a sign-up bonus – never expires. The poker room collects rake on every real money hand that is played. Before the pot is awarded to the winner, the poker room rakes off its share, which is usually a 5% fee up to a maximum of $3. It may not seem like much, but over the long-run, especially if you’re a higher limits player, you’ll end up paying hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars in rake.

Rakeback gives you a certain percentage of that rake back. A rakeback deal like the full tilt rakeback offers you a 27-30% rake rebate, and that’s quite a significant addition to your bankroll at the end of the month. As a rakeback site owner, I can tell you that there are players who generate thousands of dollars in rake back every month, money which would’ve gone down the drain had they not signed up for a deal.

Obviously, rakeback is a great reward, but is it better than a good sign-up bonus? If we look solely at the fact that it never expires, while bonuses do, it has to be. Bonus hunters though have ways of making sure that they never play without a bonus. The theory is that as long as you’re playing micro to low limits, rakeback doesn’t offer quite as significant an edge as a bonus. Once you move up to medium stakes though, all that changes and rakeback really starts to deliver.

The funny thing is, the mechanism at work behind bonuses and rakeback is the same. Bonuses are unlocked through the accumulation of FPPs. FPPs are directly proportional with the rake you generate though, which means that your bonus redemption is a direct function of your rake contribution. The bottom line is, your sign-up bonus is also a form of rakeback, albeit a limited type one.

So which one should you go with? Rakeback or sign-up bonus? The answer to that is simple: with both. There are poker rooms  out there which offer you rakeback as well as bonuses and they don’t subtract one from the other. Play with double rakeback for a while there, and still retain your rakeback deal afterwards.