So if I understand you correctly it can pay to just sit in on a table and auto-fold? From what little detail they gave in the OP it sounded like the guy must fold everything but primo.
Ehhh... that won't pay (don't you thin it would've been too easy?).
The problem is like the other person said - there are two blinds that travel around so in every cycle you get to pay 1.5 minimum bet (thus ensuring that you loose money if you don't play). As for the rakeback... you only qualify for return of the rake that you "contributed" by winning a pot. So for example, you win a pot of 1000$ and the casino takes 100$ in rake from that. After rakeback you receive 30$ of that original rake.
So many (most?) players rely on playing a break-even game and doing profit on rakeback. I read somewhere that pro's only win 7 big blinds per 100 hands (thats long term ofc). Thats little, very little.
Rake is something that people often underestimate - its the same mechanism casinos use with green pocket on roulette etc... Its used to give casino an edge. Rake ensures that if you keep playing long enough you will run out of money - now matter how well you play.
Good post, but there are a few slight inaccuracies:
> you only qualify for return of the rake that you "contributed" by winning a pot. So for example, you win a pot of 1000$ and the casino takes 100$ in rake from that. After rakeback you receive 30$ of that original rake.
1. Sites typically cap their rake at $3 per pot, so $100 is very unrealistic.
2. You qualify for return of the rake that you contributed by playing a pot, not by winning it. So if it folds to you in the blinds and you shove all-in and the big blind calls, that's two players who have put money in the pot. If they take $3 rake from that pot, you each get $1.50 contributed rake.
3. Not all sites use contributed rake. Some sites just equally divide the rake by all the players who received a hand, without regard to how much money they put in the pot.
As far as folding to profit from rakeback, let's look at a 1/2 game. If 40% of hands see a flop, and the average postflop pot is $20, we're looking at $1 rake per postflop pot for 40% of hands, so $0.40 rake per hand. Divide that 9 ways and you have about $0.045 rake paid per hand. Get 30% back, and you're only looking at 1.5 cents per hand, or 13 cents per orbit. You pay $3 per orbit in blinds, so clearly folding is not going to work to make any money.
"Rakeback pros" (a derogatory term) make money by playing near-breakeven poker for a huge volume, let's say 250,000 hands per month (200 hours per month, 1250 hands per hour (a low estimate)). Using my numbers, that comes to $3,750 each month from rakeback.
Nowadays, 7 big blinds per 100 hands is considered a very solid winrate at midstakes games (2/4 through 5/10). This is actually described as 3.5bb/100 which is read as 3.5 "big bets" per 100 hands, which is the traditional system used for limit hold'em, where a big bet is two big blinds. I remember way back in 2003/2004 when PartyPoker was the most popular site and people were posting graphs of 10bb/100 (big bets) winrates at stakes as high as 10/20 over hundreds of thousands of hands. The fact that having a winrate like that is impossible today even at stakes as low as 1/2 shows you how much tougher the games have become.
Rake ensures that if you keep playing long enough you will run out of money - now matter how well you play.
Correction. Rake ensures that if you keep playing long enough, SOMEONE will run out of money. There are many people who can play indefinitely and make money.
In hold'em variant poker games, there are typically two blinds that rotate around the table, forced bets that are similar to antes. This prevents people from folding indefinitely.
