Cashback

 

You need to understand one thing about poker cashback, before we elaborate any further on the concept: It is basically the same as poker rakeback, (it’s a permanent loyalty bonus based on the rake you generate) under a different name.

You may wonder what the reason behind this apparent nonsense of a “repackaging” is, since nothing is ever done in the online poker world without some serious reasons.

In order to understand what goes on, you need to know  a thing or two about the brief history of rakeback.

 

Rakeback was first invented by affiliate websites, as a powerful player-recruiting tool. As such, these affiliates had total control over it. Pretty soon, the competition between these affiliate sites led to some rogue elements cutting further and further back on their own share of the deal, in order to beat the competition, until it was no longer lucrative for anyone.

 

Not only did the affiliates find themselves in a precarious situation, the different poker rooms registered losses on the whole deal as well.

Players within a network, started moving from one room to another, generating a false influx of new players. While the network saw that its player numbers were increasing, the revenue didn’t reflect the trend. What’s more, whenever players moved on, they became eligible for new bonuses which weren’t; deducted form their rakeback, plus they made more rakeback too.

 

As the situation slowly but surely spun out of control, measures had to be taken to stop the negative process.

Network-controlled rakeback seemed to be the answer, as that would stop player migration thus putting and end to bonus-whoring, as well. Some poker networks (especially the larger ones) put an end to rakeback altogether.

The only problem was, small poker rooms belonging to non-rakeback networks still needed the edge provided by rakeback when recruiting players. Since they were forbidden to advertise rakeback, they decided they’d devise a slightly different scheme and name it cashback.

 

Since there was no network policy against cash-back, they could continue offering their players rakeback in a covert way.