subject: Rakeback Matters To Poker Sit And Go Players [print this page] Sit and Go tournaments (SNGs) are a massively popular form of poker, especially on the internet. There are a lot of skills you need to do well at SNGs; you need to have a good sense of bankroll management, you need to be familiar with a mathematical concept known as ICM (Independent Chip Model), and you need to really understand the dynamics of short-handed bubble play.
One of the skills that you need the most to be a profitable SNGs player, however, isn't in the list above, and it isn't even really a skill. It's more of a decision than a skill, and it's the decision to play at a room where you can get rakeback.
SNGs players pay enormous amounts of rake, especially when they start racking up the volume, which it's quite easy to do with SNGs tournaments. While the individual hit of each tournament entry fee might seem small, it's anything but. In fact, the poker rooms have designed the impact to specifically seem tiny so that players won't realize just how much cash is flowing out of their bankroll to the rake every year.
Let's illustrate a typical player to see just how significant the rake can be for SNGs. We'll take a player call him Bill and say that he likes to play $30 SNGs. At most rooms, $30 SNGs come with a $3 entry fee, or rake. That's the little + added to the end of the buy in so a $30 + 3 SNG means $30 goes to the prize pool and $3 goes to the rake.
Three bucks, Bill says, no big deal. Bill plays about 100 SNGs a week, which really isn't that high of a number. He plays turbos, so most SNGs only take about thirty minutes to complete, and he plays about 8 tables at a time, meaning he gets in his 100 SNGs in just a few hours. That means Bill is playing 5200 SNGs a year.
What about that $3 now, Bill? It turns out you've ended up paying a whopping $15,600 in rake. Not a bad customer for the poker room, are you? Now, what if Bill had chosen a room with rakeback?
The picture would look much, much different. Now Bill would be getting a huge chunk of that pay back. At Carbon Poker, for example, you get 35% of your rake back (and they pay daily). So, over the course of the year, Bill would get over $5,000 back. That's a pretty big number for someone who tops out their SNG buy in at $30.
In fact, with his annual rakeback earnings, Bill (who actually would have earned $5,460 in rakeback), could play a massive amount of additional SNGs at no cost his rakeback payments would fund an additional 165 buy ins (on which he'd earn even more rakeback!).
The moral of the story is clear. If you want to be a winning SNG player, getting rakeback is a critical aide to that goal. Sure, signing up for rakeback might not be a skill, but it will help your bottom line more quickly and more directly than any book you can possibly read.
