As tittle says, im trying to balance both when deciding where to play and have no idea on what to give a priority, i hate the idea on becoming a rakeback pro/volume base and somehow autopiloting my decisions at the poker table but at the same time i cant just ignore the fact that in other sites (Not PokerStars) i can get a lot more direct/weekly paid rakeback, sites with decent traffic and softer fields (as i heard), so looking for some kind of feedback/guidence/advice on this topic, looking for some foundations/theory that helps me make my decision easier, cheers.

I think it's unique to everyone and should be found out by trial and error Ideally the market drives itself to an equilibrium - at sites with good RB games get tougher so that post-RB winrates become level in the long run. But in reality there are over- and underestimated sites (e.g. imho Stars are getting too much love now), and it's the good side of poker that big samples are needed to estimate winrates, so some regs stick to sites with bad value for quite long. Imho site selection is a part of the poker skillset too.

I can't really give specific advice as I don't know your skillset at the tables (whether you play better vs maniacs, passive fish or nits, have endurance to put in a lot of hours), plus I've already said too much in my posts (e.g. August digest), have to treat such things as trade secrets

So i would have to expect most people here are gonna take that line

My advice is to focus on rb while you are at micros (assuming you have a +ve WR) until you build a roll to move up to small stakes. After which, focus on win rate as the competition will get tougher and WR will be more difficult than RB.

If you move up solely due to RB, you will plateau at a point where you'll lose more then you make via RB.

use the search function, there are great threads about this out there.

Thanks for the imput

i did and could only find one over a year old on the rakeback/affiliate subforum. If you have the link of any other winrate vs rakeback discussion please post it here, thanks.

You might like this post by one of our mods, napsus.

Klik!

After reading this post and thinking about it partly during my last session was coming to write a long answer, but napsus beat me to it by like 6 months

This is just an awesome read thanks a lot for sharing

Hello everyone, I was playing PLO10 on 4 tables on Stars (Zoom!), everything was quite good by the time when new depositors bonus has ended. Obviously, I've done a lot of mistakes during my play, so I was forced to move down to PLO2, also on zoom, just to maximise the amount hands that I play and to take advantage of straight-forward players.

But today I was talking with my friend that also plays PLO (but PLO200/400) and he told me that playing <PLO50 on stars is really bad idea beacuse of the high rake and poor rakeback. He told me to build my bankroll up to PLO50 on NLHE, what do you think about it? Was my friend right? And two more important things, I've got platinum star on stars and sorry for my english, I'm polish and I'm writing it very quickly in order to start playing earlier Cheers

Allatar: I think your friend is somewhat right. When it comes to rakeback, eurosites are more profitable because you can get a decent rakeback deal for them (60%) which is actually a lot of money if you grind long enough. What I'm trying to say, you wont be able to get such RB on stars in micros. That's why it is more profitable to play on an eurosite for a decent rb.

When it comes to game selecting, well.. my personal opinion is that I'd never play NLHE cash games because it's just so boring. The rake is lower in NLHE, though.

Hm, thank you for respond, could you give me information on which eurosite can I find an decent amount of PLO2 tables? What about FTP?

As far as I know, FTP rakeback is similar to Stars because it is owned by the same company. I am not sure about PLO2 tables but PLO4 tables are available on ongame network and on ipoker network, for example.

this is most certainly not true and is highly dependent on volume. Go read the recent FTP threads, they detail the differences.

Well, best rakeback is NOT at ps or ft, best winrate is NOT on ps or ft. The possitive with ps and ft is the software imo, but thats it. so, try ipoker or ongame

If you cannot beat pl2 @ Stars after rake, it's not because of bad rakeback now is it?

I built my roll from plo 10 zoom up to plo50. Can be easily done if your good enough to beat plo50.