Poker rakeback: how it works and how much each site really pays back

Poker rakeback is the share of the rake you’ve paid that a poker site gives back to you. Pay $1,000 in rake over a month at a site that returns 30%, and $300 comes back as cash, points or rewards. Some sites pay a flat percentage from your first hand; others pay through VIP levels, where the rate depends on how much you play.

The headline numbers on rakeback pages are almost always the top of a ladder. To show what an ordinary player actually gets, we took the five sites we’ve reviewed in full, GGPoker, PokerStars, ACR Poker, CoinPoker and WPT Global, and worked out what each returns at $100, $500 and $2,000 of rake a month, using their own published rules. The results are further apart than the percentages suggest.

What rakeback is, and what it isn’t

Every cash game pot pays a small fee to the site, usually around 5% of the pot up to a cap, and every tournament entry includes a fee on top of the buy-in. That fee is the rake. Our guide to rake in poker explains how it’s taken; this page is about the part you get back.

Two layers decide what rakeback is worth. The first is the percentage. The second is how much rake you pay, because 30% of nothing is nothing. A player who pays $50 a month at a site with 60% rakeback gets $30; a player who pays $2,000 at a site with 27% gets $540. When you compare deals, convert the percentage into dollars at your own volume.

Rakeback is also easy to confuse with three other things:

• A deposit bonus is a one-off match on your first deposit, released as you pay rake. It works like extra rakeback for a few months and then stops. More on that below.
• Leaderboards and races pay prizes for finishing high on a points table. They can be worth a lot to high-volume players, but you can’t predict your share.
• Casino cashback returns part of casino losses. It has nothing to do with poker rake, even when a site bundles both in one programme.

Rakeback is paid whether you win or lose. A losing player still pays rake on every raked pot and still gets the same share back, which is why rakeback matters even before you are a winning player.

How sites decide which rake is yours

A pot can have six players dealt in, two players who fight to the river and one winner. Somebody has to be credited with the rake it paid, and sites use different rules for that. The rule matters because rakeback is a percentage of the rake credited to you, not of the rake the table paid.

To see the difference, take one hand at $0.10/$0.25. The cutoff opens to $0.60, you call on the button, the small blind folds and the big blind calls. The cutoff folds the flop, and you and the big blind bet every street until the pot reaches $30. The site takes 5%, so $1.50 of rake. UTG and the middle position folded before putting in a cent.

Dealt

Every player dealt into the hand gets an equal share. Six players, $1.50 of rake, so $0.25 each, including the two who folded without paying anything. This is the method that rewards tight players: someone who plays 15% of hands gets credit for the 85% they fold.

Contributed

Only players who put money into the pot share the credit, equally. Four players put something in (the small blind, the cutoff, you and the big blind), so each is credited with $0.375, whether they put in $0.10 or $14.65.

Weighted contributed

Credit follows the money. You and the big blind each put in $14.65 of the $30, so each of you is credited with about $0.73. The cutoff’s $0.60 earns $0.03 and the small blind’s dime half a cent. PokerStars has used this method for cash game rewards since 2012.

Here’s the practical side. Under weighted contributed, players who put a lot of money in pots, loose and aggressive players, collect the most rakeback credit, and tight players who fold most hands collect the least. Under dealt it’s the reverse. If a site doesn’t say which method it uses, ask support before you compare its percentage with another site’s.

Player-value scores

GGPoker adds a fourth layer. It keeps a hidden score for every account, the Player Value Index (PVI), which works as a multiplier on the points you earn: at a PVI of 1 you get the standard 100 Tide Points per $1 of rake, at 0.5 you get half. GG doesn’t publish the formula. Recreational players tend to score high; winning high-volume regulars have reported scores well below 1. Our guide to GGPoker rakeback shows how to measure your own PVI after a few weeks.

Flat deals, VIP levels and leaderboards

Under all the branding, rakeback programmes come in three shapes.

• Flat rakeback pays one rate on every dollar from the first hand, with no levels. ACR’s 27% deal and WPT Global’s 30% on Pot-Limit Omaha work this way. You know exactly what you’ll get.
• VIP ladders start low and rise with volume. GGPoker’s Ocean Rewards runs from about 16% to about 80%; PokerStars Rewards from 15% to 40%, with Select tiers at 50–60% above that. The rate you see in an ad is for the top rung.
• Races, drops and leaderboards pay prizes rather than a rate. CoinPoker’s CoinRewards and GG’s daily leaderboards are examples. They pay real money, but your share depends on who else is playing.

“Up to 80% rakeback” means 80% at the top of the ladder. On GGPoker that top tier needs $100,000 of rake in a year. Most players never get close, and the rate that applies to them is the one in the middle of the table, not the headline.

Rakeback at the five sites we’ve reviewed

Before the dollar figures, here is how each programme works in one line. The details for each site follow, with links to the full reviews.

GGPoker: Ocean Rewards

Ocean Rewards replaced Fish Buffet on 30 January 2026. Every $1 of rake or tournament fees earns 100 Tide Points, the points move you through eight tiers from Fish to Shark, and each tier earns GEMs at a higher rate. GEMs are spent in the GEM Store, mostly on cash, and bigger packages pay about 25% more per GEM than the smallest ones.

The tiers that matter for most players come early: $100 of rake takes you to Shrimp (about 25%), $500 to Crab (30%), $2,000 to Turtle (40%). Dolphin, at 60%, needs $20,000 in a year. Points reset on 1 January, but the tier you reached is kept for the whole next year, which is why GG pays noticeably more in a player’s second year than in the first. The full ladder and a year-one model are in our GGPoker rakeback guide; the site itself is covered in our GGPoker review.

PokerStars: Rewards chests and Select

On PokerStars.com you opt in once, then every $1 of rake earns 100 Reward Points. Points fill a bar, and each full bar opens a chest with a fixed cash value. There are six levels, Blue to Black, returning 15% to 40%. To move up you need five chests within a rolling 28 days; go 28 days without a chest and you drop a level.

That rule makes PokerStars predictable. A steady $100–$300 of rake every four weeks keeps you at Bronze (17.5%), $300–$1,000 at Silver (20%), $1,000–$2,500 at Gold (25%). Above the chests, PokerStars Select pays 50% from $50,000 of rake in 12 months, and Select+ 60% on Spin & Go and Zoom from $100,000. UK players on PokerStars on Betfair get Stack+ rewards of up to 25% instead, and PokerStars on FanDuel in the US uses FanDuel’s own programme. More in our PokerStars review.

ACR Poker: flat 27% or Elite Benefits

ACR gives every new account its Elite Benefits ladder, where $1 of rake earns 5.5 Rank Points. You can email support to switch to flat 27% rakeback instead, paid weekly (Monday to Sunday, US Eastern time) and moved to your balance with a Redeem button. The switch takes up to 72 hours, and you can move back to Elite only once, so treat it as close to permanent.

Which is better? Below General rank, which takes 100,000 points in a calendar year (about $18,200 of rake), every Elite rank returns less than 27%, medals included. General returns about 30.8%. If you don’t pay around $1,500 a month in rake every month, the flat deal wins. See our ACR Poker review for the full rank table.

CoinPoker: CoinRewards and the 3-Bet Club

CoinPoker no longer pays a fixed percentage. It paid 33% in its CHP token until spring 2026, ran 100% rakeback through March while it moved players to a new client, then switched in April to CoinRewards: cash game races that reset every one or two hours, random Splash Pot drops at micro stakes, and support payments for players at $0.50/$1 and above during downswings. A guaranteed daily 15% that sat on top was dropped on 1 July 2026.

On top, the 3-Bet Club costs $35 a month and returns 10% of your fees, or 12.5% to 15% if your weekly stats hit set targets. The maths is simple: 10% only covers the $35 price once you pay $350 a month in fees. Details in our CoinPoker review.

WPT Global: PLO only, plus table starters

WPT Global pays 30% of rake every Monday to every player in four-card and five-card Pot-Limit Omaha cash games, at all stakes. Its other deal, the 40% Table Starter Boost, goes only to the first player who sits down and plays at a new No-Limit Hold’em table at $25/$50/$100 or above. Everyone else, which means most Hold’em players, gets no rakeback. The 20% deal for lower stakes ended in May 2025. Our WPT Global review covers the rest, and PLO players will find the game itself in our PLO strategy guide.

How much you get back at $100, $500 and $2,000 a month

Percentages only become useful once they’re in dollars. So we took three players who pay the same rake every month, a casual $100, a regular $500 and a grinder $2,000, and applied each site’s rules to them. For GGPoker we used the second year, when the tier earned last year applies from January, and a neutral PVI of 1.

A few things in the table need a footnote:

• GGPoker in year one pays less, because everyone climbs from the bottom. Our model gives about 27% at $100 a month, 36% at $500 and 48% at $2,000 over the first year. A low PVI lowers all of these.
• PokerStars at exactly $100 a month sits just below Bronze: five Blue chests need $100 of rake inside 28 days, and a month is a little longer than that. Pay $110 and you move to Bronze at 17.5%.
• ACR at $2,000 a month reaches General rank in about the tenth month of the year. From then on Elite Benefits pays about 30.8%, slightly more than the flat 27%.
• CoinPoker shows only the 3-Bet Club, net of its $35 price. CoinRaces and Splash Pots come on top, but they pay prizes, not a rate, so nobody can put a number on them in advance.
• WPT Global pays nothing at any of these levels if you play No-Limit Hold’em. A PLO player gets 30%: $30, $150 or $600.

The ranking flips with volume. At $100 a month GGPoker and ACR are almost level; at $2,000 a month GG returns more than twice what PokerStars does. Whether that makes GG cheaper overall depends on rake, which is the next step.

Net rake: what poker really costs after rakeback

A high rakeback rate can sit on top of high rake. What matters to your results is the rake you pay minus what comes back. To compare like with like, take one 100 big blind pot with five or more players in the hand, raked at each site’s published caps, and apply the return rate of a player paying about $500 a month: 40% at GGPoker (Turtle) and 20% at PokerStars (Silver).

• NL50 ($0.25/$0.50), $50 pot: GGPoker takes $2.50 (its cap is $4), PokerStars $2 (its cap). After rakeback GG costs $1.50 and PokerStars $1.60. Close to even.
• NL200 ($1/$2), $200 pot: GGPoker hits its $6 cap, PokerStars its $2.75 cap. After rakeback GG costs $3.60 and PokerStars $2.20. PokerStars is cheaper by more than a third.

Move the same player to $2,000 a month and the picture changes again: GG’s 60% brings its NL50 pot down to $1 against $1.50 at PokerStars (Gold, 25%), and at NL200 GG’s $2.40 is nearly level with PokerStars’ $2.06.

The lesson is a rule worth keeping: a rakeback percentage tells you nothing without the rake cap behind it. The higher your stakes, the more the cap matters, because caps decide how much of a big pot goes to the site at all. Our GGPoker vs PokerStars comparison runs this across five stakes.

Compare sites on your own numbers. Take your usual stake, look up each site’s rake cap for that stake, rake a typical pot, then subtract the rakeback rate you’d really reach at your volume. The cheapest site is the one with the lowest result, not the biggest percentage.

Rakeback for tournament players

Tournament fees count as rake at GGPoker, PokerStars and ACR, so the same programmes pay tournament players. The difference is that fees are fixed and visible: a $10 + $1 tournament pays $1 of rake whatever happens at the table.

To put it in figures, picture someone who plays twenty $10 + $1 tournaments a day, five days a week. That’s about $430 of fees a month:

• GGPoker: about 35% over the first year as they climb to Turtle, then 40% from the next January, or about $172 a month.
• PokerStars: roughly $400 of fees every 28 days keeps them at Silver, so 20%, about $86 a month.
• ACR Poker: flat 27%, about $116 a month.
• WPT Global: nothing, since its rakeback covers PLO cash games only.

Lottery sit-and-gos hide the fee inside the buy-in: about 7% in GGPoker’s Spin & Gold and 6% in ACR’s Jackpot Poker. That fee earns points like any other. Freerolls and tickets won in satellites don’t involve a fee you paid, so they add nothing.

Rakeback and welcome bonuses

Welcome bonuses on poker sites aren’t paid up front. They’re released as you pay rake, at a fixed rate, which makes them a second rakeback programme that runs for the first months only. Measured as rake needed for $100 of bonus, the five sites differ a lot:

Both programmes run on the same rake, so they stack. A new PokerStars player at Blue level gets 15% from chests plus 33% from the bonus: about 48% back until the bonus is cleared.

ACR is the exception to simple stacking. Its flat 27% is calculated on rake minus the bonus already released. A player who pays $500 of rake in a month and releases $100 of bonus gets 27% of $400, so $108 of rakeback, not $135. With the bonus that’s still $208 back on $500, or 41.6%, but less than adding the two rates would suggest.

Each bonus has its own terms and traps, covered in our guides to the GGPoker bonus, PokerStars bonus, ACR Poker bonus, CoinPoker bonus and WPT Global bonus.

Is rakeback worth chasing?

For a winning player, rakeback can be a large part of the profit. Someone who wins 3 big blinds per 100 hands at NL50 and pays around 8 big blinds per 100 in rake gets roughly another 3 big blinds per 100 back at 40%, which doubles their result. For a losing player it softens the losses, which is still worth having. Your own figures are easy to check with our guide to poker winrate.

The last point deserves its own warning. Game quality usually beats rakeback. A site with weaker opponents and 15% back can earn you more than one with 40% back and a tough player pool, and no rakeback programme makes up for a big losing session.

Playing extra hours or moving up a stake just to hold a VIP tier. The tier pays a percentage of rake you would not otherwise have paid, while the extra sessions are often the tired, tilted ones. If a tier needs more volume than your bankroll and schedule allow, let it go. Our guide to tilt covers why those sessions cost more than they look.

How to check you’re being paid

Rakeback errors happen, and the only way to catch them is to compare what you paid with what you got. Each site gives you the numbers:

• GGPoker: note the rake in your session history, then check the Tide Points you received. Points divided by rake, divided by 100, gives your effective PVI.
• PokerStars: the My Rewards section shows your level, the progress bar and the chests you’ve earned; unopened chests expire after 30 days.
• ACR Poker: flat rakeback builds up through the week and appears in the client ready to redeem; Elite Benefits players track Rank Points and Combat Points there instead.
• CoinPoker: 3-Bet Club rewards land every Monday around 07:00 UTC; race prizes arrive almost at once.
• WPT Global: PLO rakeback for the previous week is paid each Monday.

If the figures don’t match, contact support with the dates and the amounts, and keep the chat transcript. Common causes are a missed opt-in, an expired chest or the yearly points reset.

Poker rakeback FAQ