While some players will happily move site for a percentage point higher rakeback deal [what is rakeback?], there are many other ways in which savvy players are improving their profits. By using a combination of small factors which can improve your profits, the compounding effect could easily see your bankroll improve significantly. Add to this the best rakeback deals and you could hit the next level faster than you thought possible!
Increasing Rakeback Poker Profits #1 – Invest In Software Tools
There are many poker software tools available covering everything from real-time advice to graphing your profits. While many people see these as an expense, savvy players instead look at them as an investment. The $100 or less spent can pay for itself many times over, for example by giving you hand history analysis which allows you to plug small leaks, better insight into profitable bubble mathematics - or even on-screen statistics on your opponents which allow you to outplay them more effectively.
Increasing Rakeback Poker Profits #2 – Training Sites / Coaching
Players are often resistant to the idea of training or individual coaching. This can be due to pride, or a perception that the cost would not match up with the benefits. Smart players know that poker is a game in which you can never stop improving – and a shortcut to the higher levels (and so more rakeback profits!) is to have an expert look at your game. You can also learn from those who have crushed the higher limits at a training site. Imagine that the training helps you maximize value from just 1 big hand per hour and you’ll see how training could pay for itself very quickly indeed.
Increasing Rakeback Poker Profits #3 – Multi-Tabling
Everyone has their comfort level with multi-tabling, however this is one of the fastest and most effective ways of improving your profits from your rakeback deal. Balance needs to be sought between increasing the number of raked hands, and the quality of your decisions. While multi-tabling will give you less time for reads and thinking about each move, the net result of more hands is an increase in overall profits. Some players find that cutting the marginally profitable starting hands from their opening ranges helps keep the post flop decisions simple.
Increasing Rakeback Poker Profits #4 – Rake-Races And Tournaments
When selecting the best rakeback deal, ensure that your affiliate is able to offer you rake-races and access to freerolls. Rake-races are leader board contests which can pay out many $1000’s and usually run for a week to 10 days. Freeroll tournaments offered by many rakeback affiliates have an added advantage - in addition to the generous prize pools – that many rakeback players ignore them, meaning small fields often competing for large amounts of money.
Increasing Rakeback Poker Profits #5 – Locating The Poker Fish
This method of maximizing your profits sounds so obvious, yet is routinely ignored by even fairly experienced players. If you are playing at a small poker site with huge rakeback percentage then there is a good chance that the majority of your opponents are also experienced players with the same deal. While you may still make a reasonable profit, this is dwarfed by the potential take from inexperienced opponents at some of the larger sites. Breaking this down further you should consider how table selection, waiting for position on weak opponents and even keeping your own ‘fish list’ can improve profits. If you are not practicing good site and table selection then you are leaving profits on the table!
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If you would like more information on how to make a living playing poker, visit Bill’s Rakeback Report site.
Photocred to chrischappelear
At the meta level there are really two major ways to get into the rakeback game:
1. Develop your own accounting system and go negotiate deals with all the major poker rooms
2. Use a pre-packaged backend solution like Poker Affiliate Solutions (PAS) and set up your own rakeback site.
Even though I have a lot of industry contacts and the technical skills to write my own backend, for Rakeback Report I went with partnering with Poker Affiliate Solutions. I’ve read a lot of good things about them in the poker affiliate circles and I have been very impressed with them.
But a large percentage of the readers of this blog are other poker bloggers or owners of smaller sites who might be interested in offering rakeback but don’t have the time, energy, or expertise to know how to go about it.
I guess the first step is to determine whether or not you actually want to offer poker rakeback. I think it’s an interesting alternative for some poker bloggers because as I wrote several years ago in a post called The Futility of Affiliate Programs for Poker Bloggers poker blogs really don’t convert well. Most of your readers are already die-hard poker players so slapping a banner ad up for a well-known poker room isn’t likely to get many clicks.
But offering rakeback is something that might convert for a lot of sites since their readers might click on a link to the same poker room if there is a rakeback offer involved.
Mind you, the payouts are much smaller for rakeback affiliates but the conversions are much higher. In case, you’re not sure how this works, allow me to explain. Let’s say ABC Poker is paying out affiliates 35% of the monthly gross revenue (MGR) of each player you refer. A rakeback affiliate simply offers to refund 32% or 33% of the rake to the player and keep the difference for himself.
And whereas a typical poker blog might get a signup every month or two (or even less frequent depending on your traffic) a rakeback offer might get 3 or 4 players signing up every week. And they’re less likely to be complete newbies which means you have less of a chance of the player going onto a site, stacking off their initial deposit in the first hand, and then never returning to the site. Players seeking out rakeback deals tend to play pretty frequently which means they become a source of steady revenue.
So how does one go about becoming a rakeback affiliate without the hassle of the do it yourself approach? Well one option is to piggy back on an existing rakeback affiliate. For instance, you can become a sub-affiliate at Rakeback Report simply by signing up for a rakeback account (you don’t need to actually play) and selecting the “Tell A Friend” menu item.
There you would be given an HTML link with a referral code that you could insert into any sort of advertising you wanted. Banner ads, emails, and obviously text on your site. You can even use the backend system to create a custom landing page if you so desire.
So what’s in it for you?
Well if the players you send generate between $0 and $14,999 in rake then you get a 2% cut of the MGR. Between $15,000 and $49,999 you get 3%. Over $50,000 you get 4%.
Obviously these amounts seem small in comparison to the 35% that you might get for referring a player directly but chances are you’re signing up a player who would have never signed up under a non-rakeback deal. So instead of looking at it as the difference between 4% and 35% a better way might be to compare 4% against 0%.
Even if you don’t want to offer it to everyone you can always sign up and create your links for friends. They still get the same high payouts except you get a piece of the action.
And everything is pretty much handled by PAS and Rakeback Report. Your referred players have a backend system where they can choose what rooms they want rakeback on and monitor their MGR. Payouts are handled by PAS so you don’t have to keep spreadsheets and ship money every month to your rakeback players. For the most part, it runs itself.
So if you’ve been thinking that you might want to start offering rakeback to readers of your blog/website but haven’t been sure how, simply go to Rakeback Report:
1. Sign up for a new account
2. Go to Tell A Friend and copy the links into any ads you want to run
It’s that easy!
Photocred to greggoconnell
It hasn’t been an especially good time to be a celebrity recently. Wacko Jacko and Farrah Fawcett almost back to back and then Billy Mays. Fortunately none of them had to suffer the indignity that David Carradine did though I’m not sure anybody would have been surprised if they had found Jackson tied up.
Last week here on Bill’s Poker Blog two posts you might to check out are:
Help Me Help Me and Why Sponsored Players Cost You Money
Over on Poker Job Search there were a ton of new jobs posted. Here’s a sample:
Poker PR and Pro Management Executive
C++ Software Developer – Poker experience
Poker Product Manager
Competitor Intelligence Analyst
Poker Program Manager
You can check out all of the poker job listings here.
I’ve also put up a lot of new articles on Rakeback Report that are worth of read:
5 Tips On Becoming A Rakeback Poker Pro
Party Poker Rakeback
Cake Poker 110% First Time Deposit Bonus!
How Multi-Tabling Can Improve Your Rakeback Poker Profits
Figuring Out How Much you Need to Make a Living Playing Poker
Knowing When it’s the Right Time to Move up in Limits
What Changes to My Game do I Need to Make to Play 6-Max?
Bankroll Management
Tips on Multi-Tabling Without Lowering your Win Rate
I had a bunch of pictures sitting around on my camera that I finally got around to uploading. Here’s one from the hotel room I stayed in while in Cambodia. Pretty much blew my entire weekend (click to enlarge).
What we normally call the summer months in the US and Europe is the wet season in South East Asia. It hasn’t rained all that much since I’ve been here but when it does rain it R-A-I-N-S!!! I don’t care if you do stand underneath Rihanna’s umbrella, ella, ella you’re screwed if you get caught out when the rain comes. It’s almost as if the sky is angry and it’s pouring everything it has out onto the earth.
Here’s some shots I took from my living room balcony. The first is of a normal night. It’s a little blurry because it’s a night shot and I wasn’t using a tripod but you can see how brightly lit the buildings are. The building on the left is the CPN, then to the right of that is a halo thing at the top of Central World, and farther to the right you see the Amari Watergate hotel and behind that the Baiyoke Sky Hotel which is the tallest building in Bangkok . . . which I would assume makes it the tallest building in Thailand as I’m unaware of anyplace else in Thailand having a taller building.
Now if you look at the second photo taken on a night when the skies opened their wrath you can barely make out any of the buildings that are clearly visible in the first photo. CPN is hard to make out. You can barely see Central World’s halo. The Amari is just a silhouette . Baiyoke is completely hidden. Keep in mind that that Central World halo is only two blocks from me. It’s barely a five minute walk.
The rain typically doesn’t last long. The night of that photo it might have been a half hour. But so much rain comes in such a short period of time that the streets flood over until they can unload their burden into the sewers and drainage ditches.
Unfortunately (for me), the night of that photo I didn’t have the luxury of waiting as I had dinner plans at 9pm over at a restaurant near Victory Monument. I had to hoof it to the end of the block to Ratchadamri sky train station while the streets were still flooded over. It’s probably less than a two minute walk to the station but I only made it half way before I felt that cool, moist feeling of my socks getting soaked. Yech!
I rounded out the week meeting up with my friends Stu, Fred, and Phong and a few of their friends. We went to Dream World which is like a cheap knock-off of Disneyland.
As you can see, even in Thailand it’s wise to fear The Hammer.
But like all good amusement parks they have so many damn rules that it sort of ruins things. I mean, what could possibly go wrong letting drunken people on a high-speed roller coaster?
Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.