Online poker is getting tougher there’s no doubt about it; unless you have an account with rakeback. Training sites, coaches and ever improving strategies make it hard for the average player to make a profit when they sit down at the virtual felt. However, by harnessing the extra earning potential of rakeback you can still profit in an increasingly hostile environment.
The major advantage of using rakeback is that you can play a breakeven or slightly losing style of poker and still increase your bankroll month on month. Indeed, the most effective way to become a rakeback pro – someone who makes their living from their rakeback each month – is to play as many tables as possible.
Mass multi-tabling and a tight aggressive strategy are the key tenets of succeeding where others are faltering. Many online players now play an extremely loose aggressive game which means whenever you enter a pot you have to be prepared to put all your chips at risk. As a consequence it now means the starting hands you choose have to come from a much narrower range.
The result of this is that it becomes harder to make huge amounts of money during each session because you’re not playing as many hands. Moreover, because the players you’re up against are much more aggressive, it means that there’s a lot more variance when you do play a hand. These two factors make it tough to keep your profit graph moving on an upward trajectory.
If you have a poker account which is tracked to a rakeback site, however, (where you can typically earn back between 30% and 50% of your gross monthly rake) the effects of variance and lack of hands means you can still win. Using the dedicated rakeback calculator on rakeback.com, you can see that a player playing 6-max, $0.50/$1 No Limit Hold’em with a 45% deal can earn over $800 a week. If this player were to play 6 tables at once for an average of 5 hours a day their monthly rakeback payments would be $3,498.
For any online poker player this represents a fantastic win rate. Indeed, even if this player were to lose 15 buy-ins ($1,500) in a month, they would still be making $1,998 a month. Thus, while it is true that online poker is getting tougher, there are still ways to make money if you’re a savvy player. To survive as a poker player in the modern climate is tough but you can make that infinitely easier by opening an account with rakeback. Can you win without rakeback? Yes.
Could you win ever more with rakeback? Certainly.