When faced with the choice to play at either PokerStars or Full Tilt Poker many beginning poker players have opted to play at Full Tilt. The main reason: they can get 27% rakeback at Full Tilt Poker, while PokerStars doesn’t offer rakeback at all, or so it seems…

In a review of rake and rakeback at low stakes online cash games published on FirstTimePokerPlayer.com, calculations based on thousands of hand histories point out that PokerStars’ rake structure is very favorable for low stakes poker players. This great rake structure translates into low stakes players paying a relatively low amount of rake compared to other poker rooms.

Where rakeback is a complicated way of an online poker room to make playing poker a little less expensive for its players (and only when they sign up correctly), not taking much rake in the first place is much easier and available to every player regardless of how he or she signed up at the poker room.

The lower amount of rake that micro stakes players pay at PokerStars compared to Full Tilt can be expressed in terms of rakeback. It turns out that players at 2nl, 5nl and 10nl are better off playing at PokerStars than at Full Tilt Poker, also if they would have an FTP-account with 27% rakeback. At 2nl games PokerStars’ rake structure even results in almost 60% rakeback when compared to Full Tilt’s rake structure. And then the very valuable VIP-program which PokerStars offers to all of its players isn’t even accounted for yet!

Well informed poker players may have realized the above fact for a long time already, but many beginning poker players are still unaware of this and are costing themselves money by choosing to play at Full Tilt Poker with rakeback. For 2 no-limit players the difference in win rate is calculated to be around 8 big blinds per 100 hands. That is the win rate of a player doing fairly well!

PokerNewsBoy doesn’t want its readers playing at the micro stakes to make the same mistake, hence this news report. If you’re a micro stakes player yourself, you’ll play cheapest at PokerStars, so sign-up now!

Oh, and if you’re playing higher stakes than 10 no-limit, 27% rakeback at Full Tilt Poker is still a great deal according to the review.

Tags: PokerStars, pokerstars rakeback, rakeback at pokerstars

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Online Poker News, Poker Room News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.