I’ve signed up to yet another poker site – something that I was really trying to avoid until I can get to NL25 or Nl50 (otherwise it’s a waste of sign-up bonus). This site wasn’t offering a sign-up bonus, so I figured it was worth a look anyway. The site is Betraiser – and I’m not in anyway recommending or endorsing the site, I have no idea if they’re trustworthy or not, but just trying it out.

The reason I wanted to check it out was that it’s rake free – apparently they just take a cut when you make a withdrawal (10% allegedly, although I couldn’t find any sign of this on the site).

So which is better – 10% commission on winnings or rake on pots played? I think no matter which way you look at it, it has to be the 10% cut. I’m a ‘losing/getting the hang of it’ player, and according to PokerTracker in the last 80k hands I’ve played I’ve paid out $900 in rake, almost 5 times my BR. If I hadn’t paid that rake, then it doesn’t mean I’d be $900 better off (since many of those pots went to other players), but as a marginal player it’s hard to stay above rake – clearly the 10% deal is better for the fish and the break-even players. What about the winning players? It’s still an advantage, as it only comes out when you withdraw – that means you can build your bankroll unhindered by the continual drain from rake. I suspect that 10% is still small compared to the rake lost to the winning players anyway – some rake free sites have set a 25% commission, and these still seem to be a good proposition according to the consensus on poker forums…

Anyway, that all seems cool. So I signed up, and the interface was all very nice and clear, although I couldn’t reduce the size of the table to slightly bigger than a quarter of my laptop screen – this would be a disadvantage if it wasn’t for the fact that there was no-one on the site!!!

170 players were online apparently. 100 or so were playing the freerolls (which are pretty good actually – €50 MTT every 2 hours), 20 or so playing the $1 STT, and then 5 people playing cash! That was 3 people on a NL2 table and 2 on an NL10.

So ultimately fairly useless because of the traffic. I’m going to stick with it for a bit and see if I can build a BR from freerolls, but unless the cash tables pick up there’s not much point really. Also general opinions on forums are disparaging about these rake free sites too – they see the majority of players being competent players who know what it means to not pay rake rather than fish who join to just play. This means that the games are harder than Full Tilt etc and that outweighs the benefits of no rake. I haven’t played much yet, so that remains to be seen…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 10:26 am and is filed under Poker, RakeBack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.