Get rakeback without even playing

[Jeremy]

Normally I don't like to call out affiliates, but since this one was spamming Craigslist I will. I responded to his Craigslist spam just for fun and to see what type of reply I would get. He claims that you can get rakeback on other peoples play, even if you are not in the hand. Apparently you just have to be sitting at the table and folding to generate rake. Orly

Thanks for writing, first I will explain how we are able to make this work. Every online site charges some kind of rake for sitting at their tables. This rake normally goes into the site's profits. We get a percentage of this rake back for you. However, many sites give you credit for paying rake that you don’t actually pay. When you sign up at a major poker site, you will be getting 27-33% of the rake back, that the site records you as having paid.
Here is an example of how this works;

On fulltilt poker, your “paid rake” in a cash game is calculated by taking the total rake for a hand, and dividing by the # of people at the table. So it’s not the rake that you have actually paid, but the average of each player at the table if the rake were to be split evenly amongst the players. As long as you were dealt cards, you are included in this equation whether or not you have put any money into the pot or not.


This means that you are getting “rake back” for rake which you have never actually paid.

After I emailed him back and told him that he was wrong, this is the response he gave me. He really believes that players not in a hand are generating affiliate revenue. I will spare him the embarrassment by not listing his rakeback site.

Let me start from the bottom up to make sure you have full understanding. First lets start with scenario where you never play a single hand. You sit at the table and pay your blinds as the dealer button moves around, so cards are dealt to you, but you just fold and never play a hand. In this scenario.....consider this......

When 2 other players at the table pay a pot where they both put in 10 dollars total.......so a ($20 pot), fulltilt will be raking $2 from this pot. This 2 dollars comes directly out of the pot, so the winner will be winning 18 bucks......with me so far?

In reality each of these players has paid $1 in rake....however this is not how the site records the rake for this hand. what the site does .......is take the $2 in rake.....then divide $2 by the number of players at the table
(9 handed). This works out to $.22 per/person....So in this hand, the poker sites believes that each person at the table has paid 22 cents in rake even though that is not the case.

This is the way rake is calculated no matter what happens to you during the hand...Whether you play the hand, win the hand, lose the hand.....fulltilt will divide the total rake by the # of people at table, and that is how much rake you will be credited for paying. This method of calculation is what enables rakefreeze's players to make a profit just by sitting there.

In the example above where 2 different players have played a $20 pot, and you have been given credit for paying $.22 in rake.....at Fulltilt you will be recieving 27% rakeback of $.22 for this particular hand= 5 cents.

So to be clear, on a hand where you have simply folded your cards, you have earned $.05 from the rakeback program. Had you decided to play this pot, your rakeback would still be exactly the same.

I hope this helps...send me another email if you have more questions.

[MarkusS]

Originally Posted by Jeremy

I will spare him the embarrassment by not listing his rakeback site.

*cough*rakefreeze dot com?*cough*

[scrawnybob]

lol and if your really reading closely and join the dots its quite easy to figure the site out

id say your probably doing them a big favour Jeremy ... hopefully they'll figure out the concept has a hole in it before it costs them alot of money and end up out of pocket ...

a bit of embaracement now is going to be a whole lot better than alot more when the penny drops if they ignore your thoughts IMHO

SB

[TheDonk]

I realize this wasn't your point, but the guy doesn't even know what the correct rake % is. He has it at 10% - yikes!

Clearly he's an expert who should be telling people the finer details of the rakeback system.

TheDonk

[Brandon]

what are you doing on craigslist this late at night?

[DontLook]

Ok, I seen the same ad on craigslist and I responded 2 days ago. I realized this seemed too good to be true so I decided to give it a try myself.

I put $20 into my BR. I played and played and played. Even though common sense says 5% rake with blinds of .25/.50 = .75 total per round is my expense. Even if the system did work as discribed (which is does not), to be making cash the pot would have to rake atleast .80 x 9 players at the table. That means $7.20. For someone to make .05 per round there would have to be $144 worth of bets coming across the table. By watching games being played, I can tell you it does happen but not every single time and less often then it would have to for this to work.

So now that we confirmed that FullTilt Poker does NOT operate in this fashion and even if it did it would not be profitable, we can move on.

This guy who posted this ad I believe is spamming this ad to get people under him for the 2% on new players revenue. I do not think it is the Owner of RakeFreeze who posted that. I know from the emails sent in and out that they are two different people.

By the way, I started this experiement testing how much rake I could generate. After 4hr and 30min I managed to generate $9.33 worth of rake which at 27% awarded me $2.43

On the bright side, I turned $20 into $198.55 in the process playing 3 tables at a time in the .10/.25nl That is based on 2 days of play which resulted in a total of 7 hours and 10 min game play time.

So thank you RakeFreeze!

[Rakefreeze]

This is one of our affiliates doing this. Please send me his email address (or name or signup code) to my personal email address and I will have at him. adam(at)bigpoker.ca.

I'm not entirely sure why you felt this was worth a post here. Yes, hes breaking Craigslist rules and we certainly don't condone that but why did this get under your skin?

BTW, great site and I have been a lurker for years. We actually had you on our radio show during the bunny era. Amazing where you have taken this site.

Regards,

Adam

Rakefreeze.com

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Rakefreeze

This is one of our affiliates doing this. Please send me his email address (or name or signup code) to my personal email address and I will have at him. adam(at)bigpoker.ca.

I'm not entirely sure why you felt this was worth a post here. Yes, hes breaking Craigslist rules and we certainly don't condone that but why did this get under your skin?

BTW, great site and I have been a lurker for years. We actually had you on our radio show during the bunny era. Amazing where you have taken this site.

Regards,

Adam

Rakefreeze.com

Nice response Most people would deny or get annoyed, but I think you handled this very well. Welcome to the site.

[Jeremy]

Hey Adam,

Thanks for the response, very professional of you guys. Please note I didn't post the url, but apparently other people have seen the spam to an they posted it.

It didn't really get under my skin personally. And I could care less about promoting on Craigslist or spam.....

It just gets annoying when affiliates post stupid claims like this and gain signups this way. It's not fair to mislead players with false promotions. Likewise for us other affiliates it makes it difficult when a player asks us if they can get the same type of deal through us. Hence how I initially found the Craigslist add.

Anyhow thanks Adam, it is nothing against you guys, especially seeing as it's an affiliate of yours. We run an affiliate program as well, and I know first hand some affiliates are clueless.

[DontLook]

Hey and lets not forget my great contribution to this post, letting people know it was most likely your player affiliate