She Plays Poker

What is it and where do you get it? This article, which I wrote for the The Sportsman newspaper (May 21 2006) should help. If you can't be bothered with the whole thing, there's a digest at the end. The guys I interviewed for the piece have since been good enough to set me up as a sub-affiliate so if you sign up with them using the links and mention ShePlaysPoker, I'll get to share the commission. I might not reach the highest standards of journalistic ethics but at least I'm honest. Right? Sword of truth and all that.

Poker sites take an estimated $3.5bn a year, almost all of it in ‘rake‘ taken from the winning pot or tournament entry fees, and yet punters at some of the most popular sites could be getting up to 40% of their money back - if only they knew how.

The big poker sites use affiliate marketing to pull in the punters, letting others do their advertising for them and in return sharing in the rake generated by that customer. Savvy affiliates try to sign up regular players by splitting the returned rake - the ‘rakeback’ deal - with the punter.

Poker sites desperate to create critical mass for their games by signing up as many players as possible offer affiliates as much as 45% of each customer’s rake, and cut-throat affiliates are willing to return as much as 40% back to the customer. With rake costing around $0.35 per hand to each player at a typical $5/$10 6-max limit game, a player could receive around $10 per hour, just for sitting at the table.

Finding an affiliate offering rakeback is easy. Sites like RakeRebateReview.com list and review all the major operators, while the online chat forums at TwoPlusTwo.com - the publishing company run by poker legends David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth - also features a rakeback discussion zone.

There are five or six large operators, each with a stable of a 1000 players or more, and a further 10 to twelve that have established businesses and good track records of delivering. But there are also rogue operators looking to make a quick buck by offering more than they can deliver - sometimes more than they themselves will get paid - with no intention of ever making any payouts to punters.

“I wish it was a controlled market full of scrupulous people. Unfortunately, it’s not,” says Karim Wilkins, CEO of RakeTheRake. com, a leading affiliate. He says that if you get propositioned while playing online via the chat box it’s a sure sign the person is not to be trusted. “They shouldn’t be doing that.”

What’s surprising is how few punters take up rakeback offers. Only between 20,000 and 30,000 players receive rakeback out of the tens of millions of players worldwide. “It’s still an absolutely tiny fraction of the market,” says Wilkins. “It all goes back to the fact that 99% of players don’t even understand rake, let alone rakeback.”

He says that casual players are too focused on winning or losing each pot to bother looking at the few dollars in chips being taken off the table, hand after hand. Most sites charge 5% of each pot in a ring game, capped at $3 or $4. Play a few hundred hands and that soon adds up to big leak in your bankroll.

The typical rakeback customer is a sophisticated player trying to make a living from the online game, says a spokesperson for ThisIsTheNuts.com, an affiliate run by successful high-stakes player, ‘stoxtrader‘. “Most full-time poker players only break even or slightly better at the tables, so rakeback makes it a win-win-win situation, he says. “The player gets paid, the affiliate makes a margin and the poker room gets a player who’s not taking money off the tables but is keeping the games going all the time.”

But rakeback sites will take a customer no matter how little rake he or she generates. Wilkins explains. “We have no problem taking on a client, however small, we just roll over very small payments to the next month. How important is $5 a month, or a check for $50 or $100 every three months? It’s still free money to the player.”

Rakeback is not available at all the online poker rooms. The biggest, PartyPoker, has a strict no-rakeback policy for its affiliates, as does Paradise Poker. The second-largest room, PokerStars doesn’t even offer affiliates a revenue-sharing deal. However, both Party and Pacific allow affiliates to run freeroll tournaments called ‘snowballs’ with a cut of the total rake paid as prize money.

These large rooms already have thousands of players 24 hours a day so they have little need to attract the professional who make up the bulk of rakeback receivers. “Customers look for a lot more from a site,” says John Shepherd, a PartyPoker spokesman. “We have the liquidity on the site, great systems and every type of poker available.”

Under-the-table deals are possible but most reputable affiliates won’t offer them for fear of being cut off by their paymasters, the poker rooms. “We watch our affiliates very closely,” says Shepherd. “They are our partners and they carry our reputation.”

But if the games are available elsewhere, a rakeback deal can make all the difference between winning and losing. As Wilkins says, “Rakeback gives players an added edge and they should get themselves educated about it.”