Rake is what the house takes as their payment for hosting a poker game.  Generally, it is a percentage of the pot in a cash game usually capped at a certain amount.  This is how poker sites make money.  Rakeback is giving back a percentage of this rake to players as an incentive to get them to play at said site more often.  Poker sites vary with their rakeback offers, but almost all of them offer some form of rakeback now.

In the beginning there was no rakeback, and players were sad.  Then in 2004 Absolute Poker started offering “rake rebate” through certain affiliates.  There was much rejoicing.  An immediate success, almost all sites soon followed with some form of rakeback concept.  Usually the money is a cut of the affiliate’s fees and to receive rakeback, you had to sign up through the right affiliate.   But sites such as Raider Poker made rakeback the main draw for their site by offering it to every player.

The first few affiliates offering rakeback saw a marked increase in the number of signups they got, but lower fees per user.  Soon everyone had to offer rakeback to compete for players.  The net effect was lower overall fees to affiliates, driving marginal operators out of the business.

Rakeback is here to stay and it is a very good deal for the players, especially high volume cash game players.  If you play cash games you really cannot afford to get a rakeback deal and start getting back some of the rake that you pay to the site.

RakebackDeals.info was started to group all the great rakeback deals together so that players could compare them side by side and choose the ones that suited them best.  Look over all the great deals and remember, do not download a poker site without checking here and using our link, or you might not get the rakeback you deserve.