Maximising Your Bankroll With Poker Rakeback and Referrals

Like most players, when I first started playing online poker several years ago I knew nothing about rakeback. I saw an ad for a poker room, clicked the link, liked what I saw and signed up. Several months later I stumble across an article on rakeback and found out that I was missing out on hundreds of dollars each month. As you can imagine, I wasn't too happy.

So why didn't my poker room tell me about rakeback? The simple reason is profit. Paying rakeback reduces the profit margin of the house. With that being the case, you might ask why they bother offering rakeback at all, especially if they aren't going to be upfront about it?

It's because rakeback is a marketing tool. You see, poker rooms get their members from two main sources. The first is direct referrals. These members find the site by word of mouth, through merchandising material or via marketing campaigns created by the poker room itself. This is how the majority of people first find a poker site, the unfortunate masses who eventually learn about rakeback the hard way after many months of playing.

Alternatively, members can be generated by affiliates of the poker room. Affiliates are people the site has enlisted to send internet traffic to them. Affiliates for their part, come in two flavours. There are affiliates who simply send traffic to the site without offering any out-of-pocket incentives to get people to join. They simply promote whatever the room itself may offer. Then there are affiliates who provide prospective members with extra benefits for signing up through their account. These benefits can include free tournaments, merchandise, free bankrolls and/or rakeback. All of these incentive are paid for directly by the affiliate. Poker rooms in turn compensate affiliates by paying them a commission for each new player they send. This commission is either a straight money value payment for the each new member joining the site or an ongoing percentage of the rake generated by the player. This of course reduces the profit margin of the room and as such they would greatly prefer it if every player came directly to their site.

So basically, rakeback is a marketing tool that the more generous affiliates employ to generate players for the poker room. These affiliates make less as paying rakeback reduces their profit significantly, the same way that paying an affiliate reduces the poker room's profit. But it does make for happy poker players and the smarter affiliates know that people who receive rakeback generally play more often and are more profitable, which in turn benefits the affiliate in the long run.

But even among rakeback providers, there are things you need to look for to ensure you are receiving the best possible deal. Yes, most affiliates will offer you the maximum level of rakeback allowed by the poker room but there are other areas that can further increase your bankroll, one of these being referrals.

For those who don't know, a referral is a friend or associate who signs up to a poker room under your account. As such, you are basically performing the same service as the affiliate does for the poker room - you are finding new players and directing them to the site. Except, in this case, you are sending them to the affiliates site rather than directly to the poker room.

If used wisely, referrals can generate more money for you than rakeback. A lot more money. Imagine you know just 5 people who are playing online poker without rakeback and you get them to sign up under your rakeback account. On average, all these friends play poker as much as you do. Or, alternatively, you could know just one or two players who play a greater volume of games than you or at a higher limit. Now put a 4% commission, paid to you, against each of those players. That's 4% of the rake they generate in your pocket, for life. Then add a further.5% commission, paid to you, for every player that those second tier players refer. Then a further.2% of the rake for players that the third tier players refer. As you can see, there is the potential for a lot of extra money to be made using this system.

Most affiliates offer referral payments in the range of 2-4% in the top tier,.5% in the second tier and.2% for the third tier of referrals. Their are however rakeback sites that offer significantly more than these commission rates.

You should also be wary of sites that offer a flat payment for each player referred - eg. send us a friend, get $125. NEVER use a rakeback provider who is offering you flat payment referrals. It may seem attractive to get a lump sum all at once, but in the long run you will lose out on significant commissions - perhaps thousands of dollars.

You should also note that some poker affiliates use underhanded tactics or tricky wording to sound like they are giving you a great deal - like offering you 10% of your friend's "rakeback" rather than his actual "rake". Remember that a player's rakeback will only be around 27-40% of his actual rake, so these sites are only offering you the same 2-4% as their competition.

Another trick rakeback providers use is their offer of "exclusive" monthly promotions. 99% of the time this is false advertising - the promotion is usually exclusive to the poker room, NOT the rakeback provider.

For example, a rakeback site might offer $600,000 in promotions per month. Out of this total, they run $500 worth of exclusive freerolls themselves. The other $599,500 consists of the rake races, rake chases and freerolls that the poker rooms run themselves - you would be enrolled in these regardless of whether you signed up through the rakeback provider.

Alternatively, a smaller rakeback provider could offer only $200,000 in promotions because they offer less poker rooms, but they could have several thousand dollars worth truly exclusive promotions on offer. If you are interested in joining a site that offers more value, the more true exclusive promotions on offer, the better.

So it is definitely a good idea to shop around when looking for your rakeback provider. Don't just jump onto the first sites you find in a search result. Yes, these are generally the larger sites but they only rely on their search engine position for new members - i.e. they generally don't offer much added value as they don't need to compete as much.

I hope this article helps in your search for a better deal and good luck at the tables.

Rakeback King offers players more ways to increase their bankroll. They don't just have the highest rakeback available, they lead the industry in referrals with up to 12.5% commissions and run a monthly Bonus Club that adds up to $625 to your bankroll. If you are looking for a better deal, Rakeback King is there to help.

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