What Is Added Value?

Added value simply means that something is worth more than you are paying for it. If someone sells you a seat at the main event of the World Series of Poker for $5000, you have gained value, since it is worth $10,000. On the other hand, if Phil Hellmuth offers to sell you half of his World Series of Poker main event winnings for $6000, you are probably gaining value, even though the face value of such a proposition would be $5000, because he is such a strong player.

How Can You Take Advantage of Added Value?

The most common situation you will find yourself in where you can gain added value is in a tournament with a large guarantee. A guarantee means a certain amount of money will be paid out no matter how many entries they get. Generally, the buy-ins are enough to cover the guarantee but if not, you have added value. For example, with a $100 buy-in tournament with a $200,000 guarantee, the tournament would need to get 2000 players to make their guarantee. If they do not, you get added value, because there is more money available than has been contributed per person. Be on the lookout for these opportunities.

Rakeback Do’s and Don’ts

When looking for rakeback deals, do:

Go to a rakeback affiliate. You won’t find rakeback directly at your poker site. You will need to go to a site that is specifically designed to direct poker traffic to sign up with various online poker sites through offering rakeback.

Find the best rakeback deal you can. Not all rakeback deals are created equal. You may be offered 10 percent, 20 percent or even 30 percent rakeback. The amount of rakeback may depend on how popular the site is to begin with and how badly they need traffic, but even if you have a specific site in mind, it can’t hurt to sniff out the best deals.

Prepare to sign up with some of the less well-known sites. If you have to play on a major site like PartyPoker or PokerStars, you’re out of luck when it comes to rakeback. These sites are big enough that they don’t need to offer this kind of promotion. If you don’t mind playing on one of the less popular sites though, you can find all sorts of great deals.

When looking for rakeback deals, don’t:

Don’t try to get a sign up bonus and a rakeback deal with the same site. You cannot do both, so if you’ve already signed up with a site using an online poker bonus (or signed up without any kind of promotion), you will have no chance of getting rakeback for that site.

Don’t sign up through a rakeback deal if you don’t plan to play on the site long term. Rakeback really pays when you put in many hours at a given site. If you’re planning a “hit and run,” you’re much better off seeking out a lucrative sign up bonus.

Rakeback Is Rich

Okay, so almost every Christmas your good old Uncle Randy finds a shiny silver dollar behind your ear — just as you are opening the yard-sale sweater he had helped your Aunt Eunice find for you. Rakeback is not a cheapskate, but it does “re-gift” you money every time that you play poker.

Rakeback Is Consistent

You are understanding when some years later your good old slightly senile Uncle Randy sneezes a roll of pennies in place of that silver dollar. Rakeback never comes up short. Every dime that you hand over in rake is calculated, and the money you collect in rakeback is refunded to your account every month.

Rakeback Is Always Ready to Play

Sometimes Uncle Randy has to join Aunt Eunice when she combs local yard sales for hidden treasures and canned food, leaving you one player short of a poker game. Rakeback is always an available bonus option, and all you have to do is play for rakeback to pay.

Rakeback Can Aid in Your Victory

Most players measure their success in terms of their win rate. If you are playing without rakeback, the rake is already present in your current figures, but you are neglecting the potential for a 30 percent jump in your win rate. If you are already a winning player, rakeback can significantly increase your bankroll. If you are on the fringe of playing in the red, rakeback can provide the bankroll buffer that keeps you going. In the course of a month, if you are paying $100 in rake, you could receive $25 or $30 back at the end of the month simply by playing on a poker site that offers rakeback.

Just remember that there are restrictions on having multiple accounts with the same poker site. An attempt to open a second account with your present poker site will result in you being kicked off the site and potentially suffering further penalties. In order to start getting a 30 percent return on your rake dues, all that you have to do is switch to a new online poker site that provides a rakeback incentive.

What’s Rake?

The rake is the means by which online sites make money for providing tables for poker. Since poker games are not played against the house, poker rooms need another form of the house advantage, so they created the rake. The rake is an amount between five and ten percent that is taken from each pot. In most cases any player who receives cards gets credit for participating in the rake. Some online poker rooms give grace by declining the rake when a hand ends before the flop.

How Does a Rakeback Offer Work?

When you sign up with a rakeback affiliate site, you begin accumulating rakeback as soon as you start to play. The web site will offer a percentage of rakeback to be awarded to your account at the end of each month. So if you pay $100 in rake over the course of a month and the rakeback rate is 26 percent, then you will receive $26 dollars back into your poker account at the end of the month.

Typically, when you calculate win rate, the rake is already factored in. So consider the increase with a rakeback return. If you generally maintain a win rate of $15 an hour playing in raked games, then your win rate stands to become $17 or $18 after collecting rakeback.

Consider Rakeback

If a large sign-up bonus already drew you to a specific site, you will not be able to sign up for rakeback on that particular site. If you are still weighing your options between a sign-up bonus and rakeback, consider your own attention span. Are you someone who prefers a new poker site every few weeks? Then hefty sign-up bonuses might be the better choice for you. If you are a player who likes to stick with familiar tables and return adversaries, then the rakeback is probably a wise move.

Full Tilt, whose name is a play on both the idea of doing something with maximum effort (”going at it full tilt”) and the concept of tilt in poker, which means to lose emotional control and play badly as a result, was founded in 2004. The concept was a players’ poker site, created by players for players, and the initial founders included such poker celebrities as Howard Lederer, Phil Ivey, Mike Matusow and Jennifer Harman.

Team Full Tilt

The team of poker pros affiliated with Full Tilt Poker has now expanded to become the most massive field of pros in online poker. These pros not only play on the site, they also offer tips and advice that can be accessed by Full Tilt Poker members. Full Tilt players even have the opportunity to ask these pros questions at certain times.

Games on Full Tilt Poker

Full Tilt Poker offers a wide variety of poker games. They have Texas hold’em of course, and Omaha and Omaha hi/lo. They also have Razz, seven card stud, seven card stud hi/lo and mixed games like H.O.R.S.E. Full Tilt has cash games and tournaments and even has a large tournament series with a huge prize pool known as FTOPS (The Full Tilt Online Poker Series). Full Tilt Poker accepts U.S. players.

The biggest winners in this whole setup are the players who get 30-135% of their rake back, and may even end up being paid to play (if they sign up for a prop deal).

Rakeback works just like a first deposit bonus. I’m sure you know what a first deposit bonus is. Whenever you sign up to a poker room you get such a bonus, which usually comes in the shape of a percentage match on your first deposit. The bonus doesn’t land in your real money account right away. It needs to be unlocked/redeemed first. Some poker rooms do transfer money to your real money account right away, but this money needs to be redeemed as well: you won’t be able to cash it out till you fulfill the turn-over requirements.

In order to unlock your bonus money, you need to play in real money cash games and tournaments and generate revenue for the poker room either in the form of the rake (at cash tables) or the tournament fees in tourneys. For every dollar of the rake you generate, you unlock a certain percentage of your bonus money. In other words, every time you generate $1 of rake, some of it comes right back to you in the shape of the bonus money you unlock. What is this if it isn’t rake reduction?

Rakeback works in a similar fashion, however there’s one essential difference between sign-up bonuses and rakeback: rakeback never expires. While sign-up bonuses are unlocked completely after a while (or they simply expire), rakeback stays with you for the entire time you play at the poker room which gave you the deal. Even if they stop offering rakeback, you’ll still enjoy your rake rebate for as long as you play there.

Most rakeback deals give you around 30% of your rake back. Special deals called poker prop deals, offer much higher percentages. Many of these prop deals give you over 100% rake back, which means that you are actually getting paid to play at such poker rooms.

There are certain restrictions though that all prop players have to live by, but generally speaking, a prop deal is still an extremely profitable setup for most online players.

The idea that it is the winner who pays the rake probably stems from the fact that the rake comes off the pot which eventually finds its way to the winner of the hand.

The problem however is, that the pot is raked before it is awarded to the winner, which means that it is not the winner who really pays the rake. Who is it then? Is it possible that you pay rake even as you lose a hand? Unfortunately, that’s exactly how things work.

Before it is awarded to the winner, the pot is a stand-alone entity at the table. If you take a closer look at how the pot came to be, you’ll realize who it really belongs to.

All players who put money into the pot, either via the compulsory bets (blinds) or by their own free will, have an equity in it, which means they pay a percentage of the rake as well.

How much rake a player pays depends on how much money he puts into the pot. Poker rakeback is just about the only way to recover a part of the rake that you pay. The standard rakeback deal offers around 30% rake rebate, but there are more generous deals as well, like the PowerPoker rakeback deal which gives players 33%.

The fact that everyone at the table has a direct influence over the amount of rake paid can be illustrated through a simple yet enlightening example: player A and B are both tight rocks and they play against each other heads-up twice every week. The dealer of the poker room where they play is already familiar with the amount of rake which results from the action the two generate.

One day, player C joins their table. Unlike A and B, C is a loose aggressive player, who is a beginner though and thus unfamiliar with the subtle aspects of poker strategy. C flings his stack around and at the end of the session walks away felted.

He wins nothing, yet at the end of the day, the dealer is surprised to see that the three have generated far more rake than A and B usually do.

C’s aggressiveness created much bigger pots than what A and B usually do battle over and that explains the increased rake production.

Make no mistake: whether you’re a winning or a losing player, you need rakeback. If you’re a winner, it’ll increase your winnings. If you’re a loser, it’ll limit your losses.

Every time that you play a hand of online poker, you are paying for the privilege. Poker sites do not charge players outright. Instead, they take a percentage of the pot called the rake. The rake is five to ten percent of the entire pot. Sites offering rakeback refund up to 30 percent of each player’s rake contribution back to the player. So essentially, if you are not taking advantage of rakeback, you are just giving your money away.

Two Types of Player, Two Ways to Collect Rakeback

Before deciding on which rakeback method to go with, you need to consider your own style of play. Are you a conservative or tight player who waits patiently for the perfect hand to play? If this sounds like you, the dealt rakeback method is probably your best choice. With the dealt rakeback, players are given equal credit for contributing to the rake even if they do not contribute to the pot. Do you prefer to take risks and stay in the action for as many hands as you can? Then you will make more money by choosing the contributed method. The contributed rakeback method pays players back in congruence with the amount that they individually contribute to the rake.

Boost Your Bankroll and Upgrade Your Win Rate

After you choose the appropriate rakeback method for your style of play, you can immediately begin earning rakeback. Once the new income hits your bankroll, your hourly earnings will rise and your win rate will increase. In fact, with rakeback your average return per hand can increase by 30 percent, and if you are a player who likes to multi-table, the combined rakeback might surpass the amount that you contribute to rake altogether. If you play two tables at once on a regular basis, and end up paying $300 per table to rake over the course of a month, then you can bring home $180 in rakeback alone. All you need to do is sign up with a poker site that offers rakeback.

Ultimate Bet prides itself on offering more poker games than any other site. If there’s a poker game played at a live casino, it’s probably played at Ultimate Bet. Games offered at Ultimate Bet include the ever-popular Texas hold’em, Omaha and seven card stud, as well as mixed games like H.O.R.S.E., H.O.S.E. and half hold’em half Omaha. Ultimate Bet even offers more esoteric games like deuce to seven triple draw lowball, where the objective is to make the worst hand possible, razz, a seven card stud all low game, and crazy pineapple, a Texas hold’em variant where players get three cards instead of two in the hole and must discard one after the flop. Ultimate Bet is also host to a major live poker tournament, the Aruba Poker Classic.

Ultimate Bet Disadvantages

The biggest disadvantage that Ultimate Bet is currently addressing is its affiliation with Absolute Poker. Absolute Poker has recently been exposed as being the victim of possibly the biggest cheating scandal experienced by a major site. Although these are two different sites, the same parent company, Tokwiro Enterprises, owns both, causing some players to have some trepidation about Ultimate Bet.

Paradise Poker History

As soon as the software allowing realistic online poker play became viable, Paradise Poker jumped in, and the idea of online poker became popular almost immediately. Other sites like Party Poker and Poker Stars quickly popped up to compete with Paradise. In the early days, there were plenty of customers to go around for everyone, and Paradise enjoyed a peaceful coexistence with these other sites.

Paradise Poker in the 21st Century

After the poker world exploded in 2003, poker rooms began to advertise more widely and promote more aggressively and it became tougher to keep up. In 2005, Sportingbet, Plc, a large online betting company that services the global marketplace bought Paradise Poker.

Boss Media and Paradise Poker

After the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed in 2006, Sportingbet divested entirely from the U.S. market, which meant Paradise Poker could no longer accept U.S. players. To rebuild their player base, Paradise Poker joined Boss Media’s International Network. This has allowed them to create an environment with plenty of action games for skilled players to profit from. Paradise offers a number of games, with Texas hold’em being the most popular, and features cash games as well as tournaments.