Full Tilt Poker is probably the second largest poker room on the internet, and it holds its own through a combination of great software, great games and loyal players. Earlier this week it announced some highly anticipated changes to its reward program, but rather than excitement these have generated a lot of controversy. You’ve probably already heard about The Black Card, and there’s no cause for concern that seems to be as exciting as we reported, but some other more subtle changes to Full Tilt’s rakeback system have some of their player base up in arms.
Rake, put simply, is how poker rooms are able to generate a profit. When you’re playing in a ring table game you have probably noticed that a percentage of the pot gets removed or “raked” and kept by the poker room. If you’re a tournament player, the rake is the fee you pay alongside your contribution to the prize pool when you register. As a way of attracting new customers and keeping the old ones loyal, some poker rooms online offer what is called rakeback – they pay you a certain percentage of this rake back. Basically you’re being rewarded with discounted fees for being a loyal player.
Full Tilt is one such room that offers rakeback and, until this week, their system for calculating it was quite simple. Whenever money was raked from a pot, the rake was seen to be split amongst all players who were dealt a hand, and those with rakeback got 27% of their share returned to them, with Full Tilt keeping the rest. As an example, if six players were dealt into a hand, four folded and two players got all-in and the total rake came to $3, then a player with rakeback would get 27% of $0.50 ($0.50 is $3 split between the six players), regardless of whether he folded preflop and didn’t pay a cent or went all-in.
If the old system was simpler, the new system is simpler still. It’s called weighted contributed, and basically the total amount of rakeback is 27% of the total rake paid, split between the players who put money into the pot, based on how much money they put into the pot. So if you put more money into the pot, and thus in effect paid more rake, then you receive more rakeback. Where in the past everyone would have received an equal share of two players going all-in while everyone else folds, now only the players who actually put money into the pot get any rakeback to show for it.
The response to this change has split the Full Tilt player base into two. There are those that are strongly against it, because they feel they will be getting less rakeback per hand than they previously were. This may not sound like a big deal, but there are many players, called “rakeback pros” who manage to play enough hands at high enough stakes that they are able to be profitable based on rakeback payments alone!
Those that are against the new changes make the argument that there will now be less money paid out to loyal players. Imagine a situation, they say, where two players who do not have rakeback go all-in. Under the previous system, players with rakeback who were dealt into the hand would have received a percentage of the rake paid, and thus profited. Now, with the new system, not only do the rakeback players who folded not get any money as they didn’t contribute to the pot, but Full Tilt gets to keep all the money as the players who went all-in do not have rakeback, and so can’t claim any of the money back. The strong feeling from these players is that Bovada is simply trying to keep more money in its pockets, and not reward loyal players at all.
On the other side of the argument is a different breed of player entirely. They say that the rakeback professionals who are complaining probably will earn less money, but that they deserve to. The argument runs that rakeback professionals are very tight, and are able to earn money by folding a lot and still being paid rakeback despite not contributing anything to the pot. Looser players who are involved in more pots, and thus actually paying the rake, are generating rakeback not only for themselves, but also for these tighter players. Under the new system these looser players would receive more rakeback than they were previously, as it is now being awarded based on contributions to the pot, and so they’re no longer having to share it with players who sit there and simply fold the vast majority of hands.
The two parties are arguing it out all over the internet, and it’s surely one of the larger controversies in online poker in some time, and for once it’s not about legislation. One side argues that due to the existence of players without rakeback, this new move by Full Tilt is stealing money from the poker economy, and the other side argues that the dissenters are merely upset because they can no longer continue to leech from players who are actually generating rake. At the end of the day, as with many things in life, time will tell which party turns out to have a more persuasive argument. Over the coming weeks we will see who earns more rakeback, who earns less, and how that affects the online poker landscape as we know it.