- October 19th, 2010
- Bounty Hunter General, Online Poker News
Different poker sites have different methods for calculating your personal rake contribution and thus different methods of calculating rakeback.
The 2 main broad methods are Dealt Rake and Contributed Rake.
Dealt Rake is where you only need to have been dealt cards to be seen as contributing to the rake. For example: if 6 players are dealt cards at the table and that hand ends up raking 60 cents then each player’s rake contribution is 10 cents, regardless of who the main players involved in the hand were.
Contributed Rake is usually done via 1 or 3 methods. First method is where you need to actually be in the hand at showdown. Second Method is where you need to actually be in the hand at the rake contributing point. Third method is where you need to have contributed chips to the pot.
Let’s look at the 3 Contributed Rake variations in more detail. If a player needs to be in the hand at showdown it means that many hands that charge a rake will not have that rake allocated to a player, as not all hands reach a showdown. So in situations where an opponent folds (after the rake-charged point of the hand) and there is therefore no showdown then no rake contribution is allocated and therefore no rakeback is earned. This being despite the fact that rake was indeed charged.
Slightly fairier is the second of the Contributed Rake variations in which your exact rake contribution is calculated even without showdown. In this method, as a general rule of thumb, players who are not involved post-flop are not a rake contibutor. So people paying blinds or antes but then folding pre-flop (for example) are not calcualted as having contributed any rake, but the players still involved in the hand after the rake contributing point are.
And finally the most straight-forward of the Contributed Rake variations (and the most common) is the direct pot percentage variation. To give a simplified example: if a pot is won by PlayerA of $100 and that money came from $25 PlayerA, $25 PlayerB, $25 PlayerC, and $25 PlayerD, then a rake of $3 would be allocated as 75 cents per player (a quarter each). So that 75 cents was your rake contribution and you will get your percentage rakeback based on that.
The Dealt Rake method is by far away the best for the majority of people getting rakeback, as the best players playing 6-max upwards tend to play a lower percentage of hands than the bad players. If you are a heads-up player it doesnt really matter because you tend to contribute 50% of the rake each no matter which method it is.
Quite a lot of rakeback orientated players have got a litte annoyed with Full Tilt Poker, as they have recently switched from Dealt Rake to Contributed. This has left many of them with big drops in their rakeback.
Some alternative sites which use the much better Dealt Rake method are Doyles Room Rakeback and Cake Poker Rakeback
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