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The sites themselves are in a much better position to allocate loyalty rewards and rebates than the affiliate are in many cases, including rakeback. Some sites, like Poker Rewards and Poker Champs do just that.
So does Superior Poker.
No, changing your email alone will not allow you to open multiple accounts in most cases. If you do that, you have postponed detection until you try to withdraw only. Then you lose. It does take a little more to escape detection, I was just reading up on current methods for opening multiple accounts yesterday.
Most poker rooms themselves are not happy with rake back at all – all the ones I talked to about it have told me about the pain in the butt they have with players constantly wanting to change affiliates. First they want to move to a rake back aff, then one who offers higher rake backs, then one who offers higher rake backs and gifts, and so on.
Rake back and non rake back don’t mix. It’s one or the other, or you are losing.
The thing is that you don’t know how much you are losing to room spamming – there is absolutely no way to tell. You also don’t know how many of your players talk the room into putting them under another affiliate, and how many go through the process of opening an undetectable second account.
It is best to make up your mind and stick with it – do or do not advertise rake back rooms.
I am not so involved in this anymore because I know that the trend is dying down already because the rooms themselves are getting annoyed at the associated problems. There may be a few who will survive on this business model, many more who will just ignore it and hope it will go away, and an increasing number will actively forbid it.
In my opinion it is not a working business model in the long run and by now I am already satisfied that it will die down on it’s own.
Rooms that offer rake back on their own, or in better words, proper incentives to high rake players such as rebates and loyalty rewards, will rule because they make life easy for all. Retaining high rollers has always been an art, and rooms that do not learn how to practise it will lose their best players to other rooms anyway. Poker Rewards, Poker champs and Superior Poker have the right idea.
The list of non-rakeback Pokers, as last updated, was:
Party Poker
Paradise Poker
Superior Poker
Breakaway Poker
Poker Rewards
Golden Tiger Poker
Virtual City Poker
Vegas Lounge Poker
Poker Room
Pacific Poker
Poker.com
Royal Cardroom.comI think free enterprise will take care of this one.
I think free enterprise will take care of this too and rakeback will survive, especially in a room driven form – http://www.pokershare.com is taking the concept a step further. We shall see what happens I guess.
For the record, you can have my rakeback back when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. It’s not even the money (I make very little from rakeback because I don’t play as much as I would like and I like bonuses more than I should) it’s the principle of an affiliate’s right to spend money on what they want.
If the rooms tell us we can’t spend our money on our players, what’s next “you can’t spend money on the following PPC keywords – “poker, online poker, texas holdem…”?
By the way, I know people who have rakeback one or more of those rooms Dominique listed as being clean. Not me, I don’t play at them outside of bonus times because of their anti-rakeback stance. But as long as rev share exists people with enough smarts can get rakeback.
Also, I know because I have done it – if you ask nicely changing your email address is all you need to do to get a new account with a new affiliate on many sites. Sorry to burst your bubble but they only try to catch people who are creating new accounts for the signup bonus, they aren’t protecting the affiliates.
Do you really want to bring an end to revshare? That’s the only way of really stopping rakeback. The genie is out of the bottle.
By the way, chat spammers are a bane on society and should have their accounts confiscated (along with the minimum balance sites should make people have to be able to observer chat).
cashmirrors wrote:For the record, you can have my rakeback back when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.Charleton Heston plays online poker?!? :hehe:
But seriously, the issue is all about the allocation of the rewards (including, but not limited to, rake rebates) in an efficient, open and honest way — and the rooms themselves are best suited to do this.
Hilarious Professor!
I hope both sides of this debate realize that shifts in the industry are occuring as it matures. More sites are making tracking of individual players difficult to do, for both integrity and privacy issues. Surely there is room to both reward players and maintain a profitable model for all sides — PokerShare is a great new model. :cheers:
cashmirrors wrote:Also, I know because I have done it – if you ask nicely changing your email address is all you need to do to get a new account with a new affiliate on many sites. Sorry to burst your bubble but they only try to catch people who are creating new accounts for the signup bonus, they aren’t protecting the affiliates.This is to further underline:
Do not promote rake back rooms if you do not offer rakeback! You will be screwed, whether you know it or not!!!!!
Even the room itself will screw you, access your account and manually steal your player to give to another affiliate!
Now I need to go back and fix my poker page yet again! Damn! :banger:
Dominique wrote:Do not promote rake back rooms if you do not offer rakeback! You will be screwed, whether you know it or not!!!!!You know, I’m starting to get a vague impression that you don’t like rakeback :tongue:
ALL rev share rooms are potentially rakeback rooms. Seriously, you name a poker room, and within 5 days I can have an account set up with rakeback. Some make it easier than others (some make it much easier) but if a poker room pays rev share, those payments can be used to give rakeback.
Quote:Even the room itself will screw you, access your account and manually steal your player to give to another affiliate!I’d be very interested in seeing if any evidence you have of this or if it is just a paranoid fantasy.
Rocketfly – ever since rakeback exploded like it did, rooms have been forced to do better on the player rewards front. Why? Because serious players are starting to learn what their play is worth. Unless the poker rooms start to treat thier players as valued customers and not the enemy, the only loyalty we have (especially the medium to high volume players who use poker for a source of income and are the main customers of rakeback affiliates) is financial.
Serious poker players are 90%+ mercenary plain and simple. There is the occassional flash of loyalty (in my case I play at Stars outside bonus time and without rakeback because they are very good all round) and spite (in my case I no longer play at crypto because they screwed up with my PIN numbers when I moved house and tied up 600 pounds of mine for several months) but mostly it’s “where can I make the most money for the time I play?” A big factor in this is bonuses and rakeback.
Rakeback is here to stay, like it or not. Hopefully rooms start formalising the programs and bringing them in house as much as possible. That will make the industry cleaner (as will sites like rakebackreview.com). But as long as there is Revshare, there will be rakeback.
After being criticisized not too long ago after launching GamblePoints.com, I started thinking about the pro’s and cons.
I agree in regards to CPA programs and their inhrent attraction towards fraudsters. But when dealing with rakebacks and such, I think that it can play favorably with casino businss.
For example, with GamblePoints, you need to accumulate points which can be redeemed for gifts. Assuming, no CPA style (sign up and get xxx points), cashback/rakeback implies the member needs to spend a certain amount before getting enough points. Meaning there is no “quick gift” going on and actually encourages players to gamble more thinking “oh, I only need 50 more points to get an ipod, lets play some more”.
That’s my 2 cents.
This is a very interesting post. I think the entire issue of rakeback can be taken both ways. Of course if you offer it then you love the fact that you are able to get the stats to give your players a % back. However if your an affiliate that doesn’t offer rakeback then you probably believe rakeback is evil.
Personally I feel the only entity that should be able to offer rakeback is the card room itself. The problem occurs when crooked affiliates start offering rake backs, and believe it, there are many out there. Talk about a headache………..how many emails do you think these card rooms get in a day complaining that some affiliate did not pay them their agreed upon rake back. Do you think they really care???
I know alot of you guys probably make a decent amount of coin giving rake backs but I still feel the card rooms should be the only people to offer it :kisser: Rake Back really puts the affiliate community on an unfair playing field when promoting and further more stimulates crooked affiliates to promote rake back who will never pay the players.
Just my two cents,
Jeremy Enke
Poker Star wrote:Personally I feel the only entity that should be able to offer rakeback is the card room itself. The problem occurs when crooked affiliates start offering rake backs, and believe it, there are many out there. Talk about a headache………..how many emails do you think these card rooms get in a day complaining that some affiliate did not pay them their agreed upon rake back. Do you think they really care???Yep, that’s it in a nutshell.
But until the cardrooms start doing it and doing it to a meaningful level for high volume players, the affiliates will have to.
Anyone who signs up for rakeback through chat (or any other sort of) spam is a moron.
There are reputable rakeback affiliates out there – silence in the cheap seats, there are – who pay on time every time. They are providing a valuable service and are (in some ways) more honest than vanilla affiliates because they say “this is what the room is paying us for you” rather than promoting rooms based on what they pay and then pretending there’s some higher reason.
I’m not saying that all affiliates, or even any here do that, just that rakeback affiliates are not bad people, most of them aren’t rip off artists (and the ones that are would rip people off no matter what industry they are in – should we ban stockbrokers because some stockbrokers rip people off?
No one is talking about banning anyone for anything here.
All I always say and will continue to say:
It is not smart for a non-rakeback affiliate to promote a room that actively supports rake-back.
Also, poker rooms need to figure out for themselves that the proper incentives will keep players in their room. Affs have no interest in keeping a player in a specific room, just keeping him under them.
All of this will take care of itself.
The answer to the problem of non paying rake back affiliates is already solved. From what i know apart from us(RoyalCardClub) there are very few more rooms to pay the players.
Each affiliate that want to advertise rake back we set it for that and automatically retain the player comission that is available for withdraw anytime in the player account. Thus the affiliate have access only to his money and players can see the % and the amount they are paid directly from us, exclduding with this the affiliate fraud.Some people may not want to take a risk, may think it’s a bad idea, or maybe just thinking of a better way to perfect it.
IMO these incentive based sign-ups are looking very profitable right now.
The proper solution is to have the poker room disburse incentives instead of making affiliates spend their own money to support the room.
I am sure it is a very attractive model to the room since think they will save all this incentive money, having the affiliate pay for it instead. The poor affiliates have to compete on a whole different level, always offering a percentage more than their peers, losing their income in the process.
Affiliates operating on this level have little or no loyalty to the rooms, they will happily move their players to another room should the player have previously signed under a non rake back affiliate.
It makes for a lose-lose situation – either the room caves in and moves the player from the rightful affiliate’s account under the rake back aff (in effect facilitating theft), or the room loses the player.
What do you think the room will do here?
Mihai is just getting started here, he will feel the headaches as they start taking over his business day.
If you want to spend your own money on the room’s behalf, go ahead.
If you don’t want to offer rake back, make sure you don’t advertise rake back rooms. You will lose, whether you know it or not.
Like I said, this issue will take care of itself.
