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The general answer is probably yes. Every player pays some rake no matter which version of poker is played and no matter how the game is played. But the choice is individual. The majority of people in the online poker rooms only play the game for fun. They are just looking to get the maximum enjoyment out of their gambling dollars. Most will not know about the rake and have no immediate interest in claiming some of it back. These players tend to be steady losers. Be grateful to them for supplying your winnings. If you only play for a few hours a week to clear the bonus, there is a short-term argument for saying the rake is irrelevant to you. But circumstances can change. What would you do if the bonuses were to dry up? Equally, if you find you are winning more often and start thinking about playing with a more professional approach, not having an agreement about the rake could leave you with a problem. Then look at your playing style. If you like to get involved in the action, you will tend to see more pots and this will increase the rake paid. If you are a tight player preferring to pick the hand to play, you will be involved in fewer pots and pay a smaller rake. The number of pots also increases if you play short-handed. In a full ring, it is less necessary to defend blinds and so there are fewer pots. Players pay the maximum rake on low to medium sized pots. No limit players pay less, often because the poker rooms operate a “no flop, no drop” policy, i.e. no rake is charged when a player with a good hand raises pre-flop and the others fold. This limits the number of big pots per hour as against limit games where playing the odds usually results in a draw.

Even though claiming back some of the rake is usually favorable, move with care. Always read the terms and conditions of the rooms where you play before you act. Often, these schemes are not offered directly, but made available through affiliate sites to attract new players to the online casinos. Most poker rooms have rules preventing you from having more than one account. If you are caught with multiple accounts, your winnings may disappear. You could also be banned. Similarly, just as you check out the poker rooms before signing up, you should also check out the reputation of the affiliate before signing up. If the affiliate crashes and you lose your accounts, many dollars may have disappeared. With proper research, you can get good deals when you sign for new casinos and poker rooms. Check out the rules before you try to add this to your existing rooms.

Because rakeback is effectively free money, it’s usually a good idea to get signed up. Even if you only make a few dollars out of it every month, you might want to turn professional next month. For now, look for the highest rakeback percentages from reputable affiliates and open new accounts within the service terms of the best poker rooms.

The rake is that drip, drip of fees deducted from every pot you play (and, sometimes, from the entry fees you pay for tournaments or other “special events”). All the regular players who get into the action in the small to medium sized pots have already signed up for a rebate. To add extra excitement to those players, some sites run races – usually over a calendar month – awarding points for the rake paid and the number of raked hands played. To let everyone see how well (or badly) they are doing, there’s a real-time leaderboard with the top one hundred (or more) being paid out at the end of the playing period. How many get paid depends on each competition and you should take time to read all the terms and conditions before you sign up. Some of the top players may be grinding through fifteen or sixteen hours of play per day – i.e. only stopping to sleep (and for other necessary functions). They will tend to sign up for the races where the prize money is high. If you are a more casual player, look for low volume competitions in smaller poker rooms. Obviously, this means the prize money is also significantly lower, but you can usually find the right competition for you when you balance out the potential for some race winnings alongside the additional loyalty and VIP bonuses and privileges you will earn if your volume of play increases. Always look at the bigger picture when choosing the race – the sites through which you signed up for a rake rebate will usually have a newsletter service to keep you up-to-date on the latest races being offered.

If you are serious about trying to win, what should you do? The first step is a warning. Always make sure you keep a limit on any losses. There is no point in continuing to play for the sake of winning a race only to find you are bankrupt at the end of the month. Similarly, always stay healthy. Get enough sleep and eat regular meals. Where the race is to find those who play more hands than anyone else, you have to play on multiple tables. If the winning line is solely the amount raked, you may have to play multiple tables – it depends on the value of the pots you play for and the rake percentages and caps. If the rake you pay only rarely exceeds the cap, you will have to play multiple tables.

To give yourself the best chances of winning a rakeback race, play on multiple tables, always trying to find loose tables where people play more marginal hands. This also gives you the best chance of winning the game because you will see more flops and can play the odds better to take the pots away from the weaker players. However, this makes remembering every player’s style more challenging so, when playing multiple tables, using a heads-up display of stats and hand results gives you essential information. So, with these strategies in place, watch the leaderboard and avoid burning out. Even if you do not win the race, you will still get several hundred (or thousand) dollars of rakeback to add to your winnings.

Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have come together to play games for money. Gambling has a history spanning centuries. While no-one can doubt the lure of being able to win large amounts of money from relatively small stakes, a key element in the growth of gaming houses has been the sociable nature of the activity. People meet each other. Many just come to be seen. Others come to project an image, proving their wealth by appearing not to care if they lose big. Today, gambling is a major industry. Go to Vegas or Macao, and you find integrated resorts where every part of the social experience is structured to support the gamers and their families.

Every detail from the food on offer in the restaurants to the shops trading in the resorts is managed to maximize the chance of attracting the right people to play. Even more important is the need to encourage repeat business. The top spenders must not only generate good word-of-mouth among their circle of friends. They must also return to play as often as possible. The key to this process is making friends with you, the gamblers. Everyone from the bellhop to the croupiers to the hospitality management team must get to know you, make you feel good and build loyalty with comps and other inducements. The more you feel at home, you more you are likely to spend on the tables and machines.

Strip all this away and the glamour disappears. The magic spell is cast by the place and the people who work there. When you sit down in front of a PC in the comfort of your own home, the magic dies on the screen. No matter how well designed the graphics, no matter how smooth the animation, no matter how convincing the background noise may be, you cannot forget you are still in your own home. Yes, there is the convenience factor. Gone is the need to make the sometimes expensive journey to a distant casino. The next can of beer is only a few paces away in your kitchen. But the atmosphere and social benefits of meeting people is reduced to a live chat facility. On the positive side, technology never stands still and online casinos are evolving to meet more of your expectations. That way, you will spend more time playing and everyone wins.

To produce greater realism, the best online casinos now offer live dealers. This depends on the latest video streaming technology and whether you have enough bandwidth. Assuming you can accept the stream, you get a real person dealing live on a virtual table. Needless to say, the dealers are usually attractive young ladies and they deal blackjack and baccarat. Some casinos also provide live roulette. Up to now, this feature has been provided by casinos based outside the US. But November 2009 sees the launch of this service in the first online casino based in the US. JustBet Casino is offering live dealers for several hours every day. Now, people who play blackjack online have the chance to sit down with live feed from a US studio and enjoy their blackjack with a US dealer. This is not going to match the real world experience, but it’s getting better.

For the majority going through school, the math classes are a form of slow torture. All these tiresome problems to solve and never any obvious relevance to real-world situations. Except, of course, that the theory of probabilities gives you everything you need to know about how to bet effectively. Once you can work out the odds on any given event occurring, you are ahead of the game when it comes to winning. In a sense, gambling is the application of science. But this slightly breaks down because knowing the odds does not guarantee you will win. The actual result of the event is still determined by events outside your ability to control. Whether you win is a matter of luck. So we might conclude that gambling in general is a mixture of science and intangibles like intuition.

Why should this matter? Well, there’s been an interesting case rumbling through the courts in Indiana. Back in 2006, the Grand Victoria Casino and Resort banned a player for counting cards. The gambler made no secret of his good memory and skill in converting the count into accurate predictions about how to bet. In the real world, casinos run card games from a shoe, i.e. they shuffle together multiple packs of cards and stack them into a container. The dealer then pulls the cards from the stack as they are required. This is the favored system because, once the cards have been placed in the shoe, the dealer cannot cheat by sharping cards from the pack or elsewhere. The order in which the cards will be played has been physically fixed. Thus, if someone with a good memory counts the cards as they come out, he or she can work out the probability of when cards of a given value will next come out of the shoe. This technique gives the blackjack player the chance to beat the House edge. The combination of the optimal strategy and counting gives the player the edge. For this reason, casinos routinely throw counters out and ban them from ever playing again. Casinos prefer the House edge to remain in place. Well, that’s all going to change now because a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals said the casino had no legal right to exclude the gambler.

This victory for the scientific gambler is a real milestone. It changes the way in which casinos in Indiana operate. Whether it will apply to other US states will depend on the way their gambling is regulated but, reading through the ruling, it looks as though it should apply in quite a few other states. It would be great if this could also apply to online backjack but the sad truth is the software does not mimic the real world. Unlike the shoe and its shuffled cards, the software uses a random number generator to decide which card comes out next. That means there’s no way to use the past cards dealt as a way of predicting future cards. The act of dealing one card is a uniquely random event, not influenced in any way by what has gone before. So scientifically-minded players will be heading to Indiana over the next few months and looking to make a killing. Those of us playing online blackjack will be relying on the optimum strategy and luck to build our winnings.

Stanford Wong self-published his first book, Professional Blackjack, in 1975. It was later published by the Gambler’s Book Club in Las Vegas, then revised and expanded numerous times and published by Wong’s own company, Pi Yee Press.

Wong is widely regarded as one of the sharpest analysts of systems and methods for beating the casinos. In Professional Blackjack, he described a never-before-revealed table-hopping style of playing shoe games, a method of play now known as wonging. Professional Blackjack had a profound impact on serious players because it provided card counters with an easy yet powerful method for attacking the abundant four-deck shoe games that had taken over Las Vegas. Many pros still think of card-counting opportunities as “pre-Wong” and “post-Wong.”

In his second book, Blackjack in Asia-a book priced at $2,000 and one of the rarest gambling books sought by collectors today – Wong discusses the unique blackjack games he had discovered in Asian casinos as a professional player, along with the optimum strategies he had devised for beating them. The book also included underground advice for exchanging currencies in these countries on the black market, as well as an account of his own hassles with customs officials when he attempted to leave the Philippines with his winnings. Of all of Wong’s books, this is my personal favorite, as it reveals more of his anti-establishment personality than any of his later books.

In 1980, Wong published Winning Without Counting, priced at $200, and again, on a personal note, this is my second favorite book by Wong (and another collector’s item if you can find one). He not only discusses many hole card techniques that had never before been mentioned in print-s-front-loading, spooking, and warp play-but he also delved into many clearly illegal methods of getting an edge over the house, including various techniques of bet-capping, card switching, card mucking, etc. He was widely criticized by those in the casino industry for the amusing way in which he discussed and analyzed such techniques, but anyone with half a brain could see that he was merely informing players with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.

Wong subsequently published Tournament Blackjack (1987), Basic Blackjack (1992), Casino Tournament Strategy (1992), Blackjack Secrets (1993), and since 1979 has published various newsletters including Current Blackjack News, aimed at serious and professional players.

Mr. Stanford Wong is a life legend of blackjack and we highly recommend his website http://www.bj21.com/ to anyone seriously interested in blackjack game.

Edward Oakley Thorp is widely regarded, by professional players as well as the general public, as the Father of Card Counting. It was in his book, Beat the Dealer, first published in 1962, that he presented his Ten-Count system, the first powerful winning blackjack system ever made available to the public. All card-counting systems in use today are variations of Thorp’s Ten-Count.

When Thorp’s book became a best seller, the Las Vegas casinos attempted to change the standard rules of blackjack, but their customers would not accept the changes and refused to play the new version of the game. So, the Vegas casinos went back to the old rules, but switched from dealing hand-held one-deck games to four-deck shoe games, a change that the players would accept. Unfortunately for the casinos, in 1966 Thorp’s revised second edition of Beat the Dealer was published. This edition presented the High-Low Count, as developed by Julian Braun, a more powerful and practical counting system for attacking these new shoe games.

In 1961, Thorp and C. Shannon jointly invented the first wearable computer, a device that successfully predicted results in roulette. Thorp has an M.A. in Physics and a Ph.D. in mathematics, and has taught mathematics at UCLA, MIT, NMSU, and U.C. Irvine, where he also taught quantitative finance. For many years Ed Thorp wrote a column for the now-defunct Gambling Times magazine. Many of these columns were collected in a book titled The Mathematics of Gambling, published in 1984 by Lyle Stuart.

Keith is not well known to the general public, but among professional players he is revered as an electronics genius who has spent more than thirty years devising high-tech equipment-computers, video cameras, and communication devices-to beat the casinos. Blackjack was his initial target, and always remained his prime target. His first blackjack computer, which he completed in 1972, weighed fifteen pounds. Over the years, as computer chip technology developed, his computers became smaller, faster, and lighter. By the mid-1970s, he had a device that weighed only a few ounces that could play perfect strategy based on the exact cards remaining to be dealt. If it were up to Keith, his son Marty’s name would be right along his in the Blackjack Hall of Fame, as the two have worked as partners since Marty was a teenager. For thirty years they have jointly created ever-more-clever hidden devices to beat the casinos, trained teams of players in their use, and have personally gone into the casinos to get the money. Keith and Marty may, in fact, have literally invented the concept of computer “networking,” as they were wiring computer-equipped players together at casino blackjack tables thirty years ago in their efforts to beat the games. When Nevada outlawed devices in 1985, it was specifically as a result of a Taft device found on Keith’s brother, Ted-a miniature video camera built into Ted’s belt buckle that could relay an image of the dealer’s hole card as it was being dealt to a satellite receiving dish mounted in a pickup truck in the parking lot, where an accomplice read the video image, then signaled Ted at the table with the information he needed to play his hand. An in-depth interview with Keith and Marty Taft was published in the Winter 2003-04 Blackjack Forum, and is available in the BlackjackForumOnline.com Library.

Travel back in time a few decades and you will find the source of many modern myths. The most interesting swirl around the group of professional gamblers who devised the so-called basic strategy and those people, blessed with a good memory, that can beat the House by counting cards. Today’s wisdom says that putting the two together gives you the best chance of beating the house edge. There is some truth to this for those of you who go to real-world casinos. Indeed, many casinos actually sell small cards with the basic strategy printed in neat tables and charts. The original math wonks who crunched the numbers used to guard their knowledge and sell it only at high price. Today, the casinos effectively give it away. Why are the casinos so confident you will not break the bank?

For those of you who are serious about learning the game, sitting in front of a live dealer with the strategy cards as your reference point is a daunting prospect. You are surrounded by one-hundred-and-one distractions. You have an audience who immediately see you as a newbie and will enjoy watching you make the wrong decisions. Worse, you will play with the speed of a constipated snail. On tables with several players, there is an expected rhythm to the play. No-one wants to sit idly around while you run your finger up and down the rows and columns to decide which strategy to play given the combination of cards on display. The only place where you can “safely” learn the basic strategy is online. The animated dealer will sit patiently for minutes while you think.

Thanks to the success of the movie “21″, the exploits of the MIT team are well-known. They won millions during the 1990’s by counting the cards. Before you all rush off and start training your own team, you have to recognize the difficulty of the task. Every person has to be able to count and keep it up for hours at a time. You have to develop a system of signalling to other members of the team without the security staff noticing. Although card counting is not illegal, casinos ask counters to leave and blacklist them by sending photographs to all the other casinos. Being barred from one casino is being barred from all major casinos. This is not something you can put together in a few days. It will require months of training and planning. Even then, you are only shading the odds in your favor. You will need a bankroll. Unfortunately, this is one time the online casinos will not help you. The online backjack program uses a random number generator to determine the next card. Unlike the real-world stack of six decks where the order of the cards is fixed until the stack is emptied or changed, you cannot use counting to predict the probability of high/low cards when you play online blackjack. So all your practice will have to be in real time. Do you have that much dedication? Most do not and the majority of card counters play blackjack on their own. More importantly, they keep a very low profile to avoid detection by casino staff. That way, they can maintain a gentle accumulation of profit on their bankroll. It can be done. It just takes time, patience and skill.

Max is the author of Comp City, first published in 1994, with an expanded second edition published in 2002. In this groundbreaking book, Max exposed techniques even non-counting players could use to get an advantage over the casinos by exploiting weaknesses in the casinos’ comp systems. Max’s inside information came from his years of experience in the industry as a dealer, pit boss, and casino manager. Max still does consulting work for the Barona Casino in California.

The initial manuscript for Comp City included advanced comp-hustling techniques that could be used by professional card counters, but the editors at Huntington Press decided to delete this section from the book in order to appeal to the wider market of recreational players. These excluded portions were published in Blackjack Forum in June 1994, and can be found now in the BlackjackForumOnline.com Library.

In the mid-1990s, he started hosting the Blackjack Ball, a secret annual event for professional players, where he serves as Game Master as many of the top pros compete for the Blackjack Cup and the title of World’s Best Blackjack Player.

Now, as a host of the Game Show Network’s World Series of Blackjack, Max Rubin has become one of the most visible public advocates of professional players.

Lawrence Revere was both an author and a serious player. He died in 1977. His only book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, initially published in 1969, is still in print. If you look at the “true count” methods being employed pre-Revere, you will see why Revere was inducted into the hall of fame. The earlier methods were cumbersome and mentally fatiguing to use. In the second edition of Beat the Dealer, in which Thorp first proposed the Hi-Lo Count, he mentioned a simplified method of using the count, though he failed to develop it as a full system. Revere had a leap of brilliance that led him to come to the conclusion that the simplified method of obtaining a “true count” that Thorp had mentioned could be fully developed and employed with the most powerful of point count systems. Revere’s method was so simple compared to the alternatives, it has been employed by virtually every serious balanced point count system developer since, including Stanford Wong, Ken Uston, Lance Humble, Bryce Carlson, Arnold Snyder, and others. As a serious player, Revere’s knowledge of blackjack included such esoteric techniques as shuffle tracking and hole card play.