Understanding Texas Holdem
In order to ever become a winner in online poker, you need to understand a few fundamental things about the nature of Texas Holdem (that is what you’ll probably end up playing) Poker is not casino gambling. Heck, if played right, it’s not even a coin-toss kind of thing. Casino gambling gives you negative mathematical expectation, which means you’ll be making less than a dollar on your one dollar investment in the long-run, if all goes well.
In poker, if you play it well, you can actually create positive mathematical expectation (EV= expected value) over the long-run. Let’s see an example of a positive EV poker situation: if you go all-in on KQs, against your opponent’s J, 9o, you have positive EV on your side. It doesn’t mean that you’ll win 100% of the time when you match these two hands up (I just lost the other day in the heads-up stages of a STT on this hand combo) but it does mean that most of the time you will win.
If you manage to play positive EV situations the overwhelming majority of the time, you’ll end up making money. EV is not quite as easy to spot though as the above simplified example may suggest. If I bet $1 against your $1 on a coin-flip, the odds for winning for each of us will be exactly 50%. Since the bets that we place will also be of equal sizes, the EV here for the both of us is 0 (which is still better than what casino games offer you). If I bet $1 against your $2 though on the same coin-flip, the situation changes. I’ll win once in two trials over the long-run (the 50-50 odds on the coin-flip), when I win I win my $1 + $2 from you. When I lose, I lose $1. After two bets I have a net win of $1, which means I have a 50 cent mathematical expectation per bet. What this illustrates is that in Texas Holdem, the expected value is not only a function of the cards you hold, but also a function of the bets involved (pot odds).
If you add rakeback to the mix, your expected value, and the associated hourly rate you’ll be playing with, will go up. Therefore, rakeback is much more than just a small one-time edge that you manage to exploit by chance. It influences every single hand that you’ll ever play in the poker room where you have your rakeback deal. The 27% Full Tilt rakeback, for instance, means that you’ll pay only 73% of the rake a regular player would pay, which is a huge edge, no matter how you turn it around.
Bottom line: In Texas Holdem, you cannot afford to miss any amount of EV+, and in that respect, you cannot afford to play without rakeback either.