Why can you only get rakeback through a 'rakeback affiliate'? Why would a poker site choose to rebate money only to an affiliate rather than directly to the players?

because an affiliate's job is to bring players in. Some of the players that come into a site through an afffiliate mihgt not have signed up to the original site in the first place.

On the flip side, I would think that a lot more players who would have signed up straight away with the poker site instead choose to sign up with a rakeback affiliate. So that begs the original question.

Agreed. But since the sites were originally set up without rakeback deals the evolution was to have an affiliate (agent) bring in people to your site.

There's also a psycological feeling of reward getting cash back.

eg
poker site drops its rake from 30% - 27%
affiliate give you 3% back of your rake of 30%

some people feel better receiving cash rather than saving i guess.

Just my thoughts, i may be wrong

Is that really the way it works? You pay less rake if you sign up with a poker site directly than if you sign up with an affiliate?

No Sorry. maybe i didnt explain very well.

I was just finding reason why there are affiliates and not lower rakes on the sites themselves.

You get more $ with rakeback

Correct

Yes, but not in the volumes that affiliates attract.

1) Buy a rake
2) Take it back
3) ...
4) Profit

Greetings,

Basically what we do as affiliates is marketing for the poker sites that we choose to support. If you sign up through an affiliate, the poker site gives the affiliate a portion of the player's rake to the affiliate, then some affiliates give most of that rake back to the player.

Most poker sites don't give rebates directly back to the players, because most players sign up directly with the poker site. Many players learn about rakeback after they have signed up, which basically takes away any chance of them getting rakeback at that particular site.

Luckily we have poker forums such as two plus two that try to inform players about the benefits of rakeback before they go and sign up without it.

Hopefully this helps!

Best Regards,

RakeGuard

It seems really ineffcient to me to have an affiliate taking a cut. Why doesn't a poker site offer the rakeback directly to the players and cut out the middle man? I would think a poker site could gain a competitive advantage by doing that.

It is in fact an extremely efficient system IMO. The affiliates only keep a very small % of each players RB, the rest going back to the player - it is a high volume game and for affiliates to be successful they need to attract lots of players. If the sites paid RB direct to players then the sites would have to spend even more money attracting players. Can you not see this?

Do you have any concept of what an affiliate is???
Many companies (not just poker) have affiliate programs. The idea is someone becomes an affiliate and tries to sell the companies product. The company then pays the affiliate a %. In the case of poker it is standard to give the affiliate a percentage of the players rake.

As an affiliate it is your job to market the product you are selling. Some choose to offer rakeback to the player as their marketing ploy.

The way I look at this is that poker sites would prefer to have many "arms" to reach out to new players rather than only one "arm". By giving a portion of their revenue to affiliates such as RakeGuard they get to utilize the marketing budgets of them as well, which leads to more exposure for the poker site. Rakeguard is then given the opportunity to give most of that money back to the players (which is obviously a huge incentive to the players).

Also, why would the site offer rakeback directly if they could just lower their rake percentages instead (that would be much simpler, right)? They don't do this because, as Mr. RakeGuard mentioned already, most players don't even know about rakeback. This allows the poker site to keep rake rates higher and still keep 100% of the revenue for themselves from the majority of players.

Rakeback is the best kept secret in online poker. I only discovered it myself several months ago, and now I can't imagine playing without it. I doubt that there is a single "respectable" mid to high stakes player out there who doesn't receive rakeback. That's because they generally understand the game better than the average low stakes player, and they realize the huge impact that rakeback has on their game. I personally have had bad runs for a month or so and was able to at least break even simply because of the money I received from rakeback.

The reason sites don't like to offer it direct is a high percentage of players play without rakeback. Why would they give that up?

wsex tried it and it didn't work out so well.

Because another poker site offers a lower rake?

So if you played one hand at PS five years ago, does that prevent you from signing up with an affiliate and getting rakeback? Wouldn't such a policy drive players away from PS to newer poker sites?

If you used a different site as your example, the statement is correct (no rakeback at pokerstars). If you signed up at Full Tilt and made a deposit, played 30 hands and went busto 5 years ago, you are SOL for rakeback.


Generally only good players know about rakeback anyway, so it's not a huge, huge loss. The fish and newbies stil deposit at the most well-known sites no matter what.