What Is the "Dealt Rakeback" Method?
If you want to be a successful online poker player, you need to know about rake and rakeback, and the better you understand these concepts, the better your chance of turning a profit when you play poker at the virtual poker tables.
The rake is the fee the online poker room charges you for playing at their site. Since there is no house edge in online poker, this is the only way the poker room can make any money from the game. In the past, some live poker rooms charged "time" instead of a rake, which meant casino personnel would come around every half hour or hour and collect a fee from each player to continue.
This method was not too popular among players, and would be particularly unpopular among online players, who would probably not appreciate seeing their chip stack magically shorten every half hour.
The alternative, which is used at all the best online poker sites, is to rake a percentage out of each pot. This percentage is usually no more than five percent of the total pot, and no more than $4, no matter how big the pot grows.
A rakeback program puts some of that rake money back into your online account. Most rakeback programs offer 30 percent of your rake returned to you. To get rakeback, simply sign-up with a poker room through a rakeback site. The rakeback site gets paid by the online poker site to drive traffic to the poker room, allowing you, once you sign-up, to increase your win rate by decreasing the amount you pay to the casino. Good rakeback sites also provide you with poker room ratings, so you can make a good choice.
Since the rake is taken out of each pot and you as a player do not win each pot, poker rooms had to devise a method for how to calculate your individual rake. One of the most popular methods for calculating your rake is the dealt rakeback method. In the dealt rakeback method, every player is considered to share the rake equally. If you are playing at a ten-handed table, you are credited with ten percent of whatever the total rake for that pot ends up being. If $4 is raked, you are credited with 40 cents of rake.
Strong players tend to prefer the dealt method because it does not penalize players who don’t play many pots. Many stronger players tend to be tight before the flop and prefer to play premium hands before getting involved, especially in fixed-limit games. If the site only credited rake to players who were involved in the pot, those who play many pots would get more rake credit and hence, more rakeback.
Whatever method is used, rakeback is a great option. It is a continuous stream of money back into your account, which means bigger wins for the winners, and less damaging losses when the cards don't fall your way.
More great Rakeback Resources from Treasure Hunter Poker:
