The fact that you just can’t seem to be able to climb above that red line in poker has multiple causes. Most rookies never realize that many of those causes can be eradicated with a minimum amount of effort, and that they can improve their game by leaps and bounds by just taking care of a few basic issues.

Learning  a little bit of basic math is one way to kill the sucking of your game. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about high level math here. Poker math is basically about counting your outs and comparing the odds you get for making the best hand with the pot odds. That’s all there is to it.

How do you count your outs though, and what are outs to begin with? Outs are cards that will hit your drawing hand to possibly make it the best hand at the table. You always need to draw for something in order to have outs. If you have like 4 cards to a flush, then you know you need another card of the same suit to make your hand. How do you find out the number of outs you have? Simple: there are 13 cards of the same suit in the deck. 4 of them are already on the table/in your pocket, so you know that there are 9 cards left that will help you make your flush. The number of your outs in this case is 9. In case of an open-ended straight draw, you have 8 cards that will help you.  A gutshot straight draw only has 4 outs (there are only 4 cads of the same face value in the deck),. If you happen to have an open-ended straight draw and a flush draw to go with it, you have a massive 15 outs to make a straight or a flush.

If you’re set-mining with a small pocket pair hoping to hit a set on the flop, you only have 2 outs.

The tricky thing about counting your outs is that you really need to take all the outs you have into consideration. Take the outs a set has to make a full house for instance. You have 6 outs on the flop and 9 on the turn and you need to add one out for quads too, which may very well land as well. If you’re looking for a straight, don’t forget to count your outs to a flush and vice versa too. If you do not get the number of your outs right, you will end up with skewed odds and faulty math that will recommend you the wrong course of action.

Another mistake that many beginners make is that they never bother to learn about rakeback. Rakeback deals like the ones offered at rakemeback, offer players a rebate on their cash game rake and on their tournament fees too. While the math behind the poker rake rebate is rather complicated, a player doesn’t even have to understand it 100% to reap its benefits. Signing up as a poker prop may carry even bigger benefits as it increases the rakeback percentage radically. Do you need any special skills to play with rakeback? No, none whatsoever. Why do so many people miss out on such a good offer then? Out of sheer ignorance probably, there’s no other reasonable explanation.

Make sure you do not become the victim of any of these beginner mistakes. Spare some time to read up on poker related deals and strategy. The time you spend educating yourself about the game is an investment which will keep generating profits for you, for a long time to come.

Rush Poker is a true novelty in the online poker world. It is probably the biggest single innovation since the hole card cam, and the functional online poker client. Is it a good innovation though or just innovation for the sake of innovation? The poker public seems to have cast its verdict already. Thousands upon thousands of players took the Rush Poker tables at Full Tilt Poker by assault, and everyone was delighted about the zero downtimes featured by the new game. The hype was great about the whole thing and some people got so caught up, they left the regular tables altogether. Does it make sense for your to follow suit though? Besides the fact that downtimes are eliminated, what advantages are there to Rush Poker exactly and does it carry any disadvantages at all?

Let’s take a look at the attractive things about Rush Poker first. The number of hands that you’re capable of squeezing into the hour thanks to Rush Poker has increased dramatically. If you can play around 30 hands/hour at the live poker table and around 80 hands at the online tables, in Rush Poker, you can log a massive 250 hand per hour. How does that influence your bottom line? If you’re a player who’s able to ride the EV+ and who can thus generate a reliable hourly rate, it can mean a lot. In theory, you’ll be able to increase your profitability radically. There’s only one problem though. As soon as the novelty of the game wears off and as soon as the other players catch on to optimal Rush Poker strategy, your edges will suffer a huge blow. Still, the sheer number of hands you can play per hour will make up for that. Oh wait, there’s another not so small issue too: that of the poker rake. The more hands you play per hour, the more money you drop on the poker rake. This suits the poker room just fine, but it will further cut into your profits, and it may just push you down under the red line at the end of the day. What can you do to combat the rake? Simple: sign up for the rake rebate deal Full Tilt Poker offers. It may not be a mind-bogglingly generous deal at 27%, but it may well be the difference you’re looking for. Sign up for the deal through rakemeback and check out some of the other deals they have too.

The fact that you have no history with the opponents at your table can be cataloged as an advantage too, but in all honesty, for all reasonably good players, it’s nothing but a huge handicap. Rush poker is black and white poker. You either commit or you don’t. The weird thing about Texas Holdem is though that those who are successful are that because they know how to handle the “grey” area of the betting game: marginal situations in which they use subtle tools like reads and posing to fool their opponents. In Rush Poker, they’ll be completely deprived of those tools and they’ll have to resort to ABC, black and white poker, like everyone else.

As a direct consequence of that, Rush Poker will pretty much stunt players’ growth. With no motivation to explore the more intricate aspects of the game, people will find it useless to do so. Therefore, they will stop improving their game and they’ll be stuck on the first level of poker thought forever. Tilting will be an entirely different animal at the Rush Poker tables too. The bottom line: I wouldn’t make the move. Sure, enjoy Rush Poker all you want, just make sure you do not forget that the real game is over at the regular tables, and there’s nothing Rush Poker can do to change that.

Steps tournaments represent an excellent way to win a WSOP Main Event seat for only a few dollars. I now what you’ll say: in order to make it to the stage where you can actually play for a WSOP seat, you need to get extremely lucky, on top of being equally skilled. That’s not really the case though. You see, these Steps SNGs (at least the ones run by Full Tilt Poker) do not only reward their winners. The winner is not even the only one to move on to the next step, as the top 2 finishers are usually the ones to enjoy that honor. Those who finish in 3^rd and 4^th get to stay on the same step, while those who finish 5^th are pushed back one step. All other folks are sent right back to the start-line. What this means is that there are several bubbles in every step SNG. First a bubble to secure a slip-back of only one step, then a bubble to stay on the same level and then a bubble to advance. This peculiarity means steps SNGs have to be approached differently than regular SNGs.

First of all, you need to whip your general SNG strategy into shape. In a nutshell: start out slowly during the early stages, avoid confrontation, gradually open up your game and take full advantage of the lull before the bubble. There are three bubbles in each and every one of these steps tournaments, so you’ll have to chisel your bubble play to perfection.

The key concept for being successful at these steps SNGs seems to be aggression. The multitude of bubble will call for aggression on your part time and time again. That’s pretty much the only way you’ll be able to take advantage of your opponents on a regular basis. Reading the opposition is of course also important. You need to know how each and every one of your opponents will react to all the various bubbles coming your way. Regardless of all the different rewards available in these steps SNGs, the goal should be clear for you: you want to advance. Sure, it’s nice to stick around, it’s better than sliding back, but that’s not what you’re after. Your objective is a clear indication that you should play these tournaments as the fox and not as the farmer.

SNGs have a very interesting wolf-pack aspect to them. Players tend to gang up on the weak (in this case the short-stacks) and to bully them around until they’re eliminated. You want to be aggressive, but you need to be selective about your aggression. When a short-stack is making his last stand, you do not want to push his opponents out of the hand. The more starting hands the short stack has to go up against, the worse his odds will be for surviving. Te wolf-pack mentality sometimes tells you to make slightly different decisions than you would in a cash game for instance.

Make sure you’re adequately bankrolled. If you play optimally aggressive Steps SNG strategy, you’ll be pushing your chips into the idle quite often. You should have at least 10 buy-ins for the level to which you advance, in order to offer yourself a cushion against that nasty old variance.

Sign up for rakeback too, and make sure that the rakeback deal or poker propping deal that you register for does indeed cover SNG tournament fees. The tourney fees constitute a huge hurdle bankroll wise, and a solid rakeback deal will help you diminish their impact a little.

Courts all over the nation have repeatedly ruled in favor of poker being considered a game of skill rather one of chance, but there is no denial: there’s a very potent element of luck involved in the game. One may as well say that the skill element is used to maneuver the luck element favorably. What that means is that through skill, you’re the artisan of your own luck. While luck won’t always side with you, if you do everything according to the book, it will favor you over your opponents in the long run.
How do you create your luck at the table though? Do you just sit around looking pretty, waiting for Lady Luck to develop a fancy on you, or do you go out there and get busy?

The first thing you can do to entice luck to your side is to take all reasonable off-table factors into account and to act on all of them. Take rakeback for instance. It has nothing to do with skill or with actual play. Being informed and just taking the time to register for a rakeback deal (like the ones offered at rakemeback) is all it takes. Rakeback will give you a more than welcome edge at the table. At certain popular limits (like $1/$2) beating the rake is what makes the difference for good players. A rakeback deal will pretty much beat the rake for you single handedly.
Table selection is another such factor, one that doesn’t call upon your actual poker skills. Some of the best players in the industry have said that how successful you are over a certain skill level depends on one thing and one thing only: table selection. Playing against players who are more than willing to give up their chips to you is not the same as playing against a bunch of skilled guys hell bent on wringing some juice out of you. These factors which are not directly related to actual play will make you much luckier at the table.

Once you take your seat at the green felt though, poker skill takes over. One of the most basic ways to make yourself luckier than your opponents are, is to exploit your table image.
You don’t actually have to cultivate a given table image (although you could do that too) however, you need to be aware of your table image at all times. The success or failure when exploiting your image doesn’t hinge on the type of table image you have. Take Chris Ferguson and Ilari Sahamies for instance. One of them plays a math-based analytic style of poker, the other one is a loose cannon. Both of them are successful though, because they’re aware of their table images and they know exactly how to exploit them too.

Being aware of your own table image is not that simple to achieve though. While you have a general table image (by which people who play against you often will recognize you) you also have a micro table image, which changes constantly as you play. While your general table image remains relatively stable, your micro table image changes all the time, depending on your actions. It is your micro table image that decides how your opponents will play against you on any given hand. For players with loose-aggressive general table images that may not be good news, for those with a solid tight-aggressive image though, it is a blessing in disguise. Because their general image prompts opponents to play cautiously against them, they’ll be forced to resort to the use of micro table images anyway.

C-betting has become such a popular move these days that almost everyone who thinks of him/herself as a good player uses it. What that means however is that many of these people won’t do the move properly: they’ll commit too often and they’ll give up too often too when faced with solid opposition. In a word: these people have a huge hole in their game, one that you simply cannot leave unexploited.
The best way to bust a bluff (because the c-bet is a bluff after all) is through another bluff. Floating is the name of the game, and keeping your opponent honest is the mission. Floating is basically tagging along, calling your opponent’s c-bet to see how he/she reacts on the turn. This is what the basic mechanism of a perfectly executed successful bluff looks like: Your opponent fires out a preflop raise to show you he wants some action. You make the call. The flop misses his hand completely, but he follows up with a continuation bet to tell you that he still likes his hand and to make you fold. You call this bet too. With the seeds of doubt already planted in his mind preflop, your second call confuses your opponent. On the turn, he decides to play it safe and checks it to you. You fire out a bet and at that point, your opponent realizes that you’ve been trying to build the pot all along, and that you probably have a monster, so he quits and folds. That’s how things are supposed to work. That doesn’t mean that’s how they are actually going to work too though. In order to put your floating plan into motion, you first need to select the right type of candidate for it. Pick a player who c-bets a lot, but fails to protect his investment by firing out a third bet on the turn.
You can do this selection via observation (the old fashioned way) or via a poker analysis software, in which case you have to look at the flop c-bet and turn c-bet stats. If you see an obvious disparity in favor of the former, you know you have your man.
Now then, you have your target. How do you execute? The floating maneuver is obviously a bluff, most often regarded as a pure bluff (which means that you do not have any sort of a hand at all when executing it), however, to stay on the safe side, you should always float with hands that do carry at least a few outs to a potential winner. You do not need to have a whole bunch of outs like in the case of a semi bluff, but having some is certainly a good idea. As they say: when it comes to floating, any sort of equity is better than no equity.
How important is it to hold some sort of equity when floating? Extremely important. As a matter of fact, if you happen to find the perfect opportunity for floating, but you do not have any sort of equity on your hand, don’t do it. Better save the ammo for the next round when your odds may improve radically.
Make no mistake, when floating, your goal is to make your opponent fold. You need the outs to have a plan B to fall back to, but hitting one of those outs and winning the hand through a showdown should be a last resort.
If you’re a cash game player, besides making money floating, you’ll need a good rakeback deal too. The Full Tilt poker rakeback is one such deal, but it only gives you about 27% rake back. If you want to go for all the marbles, why not sign up for as generous poker prop deal instead?

This question might turn out to be a more important one than you think. You see, the way you play your draws can be responsible for a very discrete, yet potent leak you have in your game. The fact is, only a part of your winnings come from hands that go to a showdown. The remaining part of the money you win (or lose) comes from hands that never see a showdown. If you manage to win more money than you lose on non showdown hands, you’re fine and your “red line” is a strength rather than a liability. If you lose more on these hands though, your read line slopes downward and needless to say, it produces a leak in your game which will make it much harder for you to make money at the table. If you have a downward sloping red line, you’re probably not playing your draws aggressively enough.

Probably due to the wide availability of educational material on the internet, online poker has grown more and more competitive over the years. Nowadays, 6-max games are insanely aggressive online. There’s absolutely no point in not playing a draw like a 4-card flush on the flop aggressively. Your average player raises at least 16% of his hands, and he goes on to c-bet around 70% of the time. If you aim to slow-play your draw and the turn card misses you, you’ll have no choice but to fold to your opponent’s continuous pressure. Moves like this are among the leading causes of a nasty downward pointing red line. The solution? Be aggressive.

Why is it that being aggressive is a better choice than slow-playing your draws? The semi-bluff is an excellent example in this sense. You do know why a semi-bluff is better than a pure bluff or a slow-played draw, don’t you? Because it offers you two ways to win the hand. You can take it down by forcing your opponent to fold, or you can take it down by filling up your draw and showing it down. A little something called “fold equity” is at work here. It is because of this fold equity that being the aggressor always offers you better odds than being the caller.

The reason why being aggressive in an already ultra aggressive game is the best way to push your red line upward again, is that with your opponents being as aggressive as they are, they’re likely to put a lot of money into harm’s way on subpar hands. That’s right. With them raising 16% of the time and then c-betting that 70% of the time, you’ll be faced with some real rags on the flop and your opponent will have to yield to your raise, his hand unfit to take the battle to that level.

Suppose you make your aggressive move on the flop on your 4-card flush and your opponent calls you. In this case, you need to contemplate his calling range a little. In such aggressive games, people are generally tempted to call a bet or a raise on the flop somewhat lightly. If you suspect that is indeed the case, shove it all in on the turn and watch your opponent fold to the pressure.

If your opponent goes all-in in response to your bet/raise on the flop, you’re in a pretty tight spot. Like it or not, in this situation you need to make that call. Such shoves generally offer you pot odds so great that they beat your nine-outer against odds twice.

That brings us to another issue concerning aggressive play: the variance. Whenever you go aggressive, you need to expect the variance to play wild tricks on you. You have to prepare yourself mentally to look at the long-term picture. The wild short term variance may seem intimidating, but your red line will thank your for the aggressive approach in the long run.

Sign up for a rakeback deal to further enhance your hourly rate. A deal like the Betfair rakeback or the Absolute Poker rakeback will take the bite out of the poker rake.

One of the biggest mistakes rookies make at the green felt is related to how they treat their own mistakes. Apparently, most beginners are simply unable to learn from their own mistakes, unless those mistakes are so large that they lose their entire stack on its account. Most mistakes however are much more subtle than that. The person committing the mistake only loses a small amount of chips per pot, however if one were to keep track of all these small losses, the end result would be a surprising one: these small mistakes which compound in the long-run, end up costing the player more than the few big mistakes he makes.

Here are some of the most important tiny leaks that beginners have in their game.

The coin-flip. This one’s a true classic. If you join an online poker room (preferably one that offers rakeback too) and you sit down to a cash table, you’re almost certain to see preflop all-ins. Such preflop moves are usually the sign of a player hoping for a coin-flip and a subsequent double up: the seemingly easy way to rack up the money. The problem with these cash game coin-flips is that they carry negative EV most of the time.

Beginners who learn the game from television are most vulnerable to this sort of leak. Televised poker games are usually tournaments and only the juiciest parts of the action are shown as hours upon hours of folding and checking doesn’t really work well for ratings. The highlights of televised events are the coin-flips that players are willing to take in the late stages of tournaments to somehow prolong their tournament lives. What beginners fail to understand though is that tournament play is radically different from cash game play, especially through the prism of the perpetually escalating blinds. There comes a certain point in a tournament when putting your entire stack into harm’s way on nothing but a coin-flip doesn’t just make perfect sense, it is one of the best possible decisions you can make.

Such coin-flip justifying circumstances are inexistent in cash game poker. Here, the advice of any investor to just wait till the odds are better and pounce on the opportunity then, is the golden rule. Let’s take a look at a classic example: the A,K. In the late stages of a tourney, shoving all-in on an A,K is natural. In a cash game it’s not such a great choice. Here’s why: when you make that do or die move on your A,K in a tournament, you’re highly likely to be up against a small pocket pair or a hand like 8,9,  or 7,J people push all-in on out of desperation and the lack of another – more viable option. In a cash game, if you’re faced with players who understand how money is made in cash game poker, you’re likely to be behind from the start. In a cash game, a preflop shove can only possibly be justified by pocket rockets, pocket Ks or A,K. This means that the best you can hope for – save some extraordinary good luck  - is to split the pot.

Another common beginner mistake is the overplaying of subpar hands. If you could watch a beginner play, you’d be surprised to see how many chips he’s willing to risk on a top pair, not to mention a pair of As.

The overplaying of hands like say a 2 pair on the flop, stems from the low level of thought beginners play on. When the beginner sees his two pairs on the flop he tells himself  he’ll take this one all the way even if it eats up all his chips.

The experienced player, who’s achieved a higher level of poker thought, sees things in a different light. He knows that if his opponents have nothing, his two pair will only earn him the blinds and a little more on the side. If his opponent has a pair, he might be willing to call a bet. There’s only one way for his opponent to take that hand to a showdown and that is if he has a set or something bigger.

Always look at your hand from the perspective of your opponents. Take your poker thought to a higher level and eliminate these apparently petty mistakes from your game.

Sign up for rakeback too.  Playing without a rakeback deal like the full tilt rakeback or the NoiQ rakeback can be considered a mistake like the two described above. Rakeback-less play is indeed a lot like sailing along in a leaky boat.

Because Texas Holdem is a fixed position game, where you sit at the table offers you certain advantages over your opponents or disadvantages. Generally speaking, being “in position” means to act after the majority of players at your table, possibly after all of them. Being out of position means to be among the first to act.
The dealer button goes around the table in a clock-wise direction, and position is dependent on the dealer button. This means that wherever you sit, you’ll have your turn being in early position as well as in late position. You can secure an advantage over a given player though, by sitting down on his/her immediate left. That will mean that you’ll have to act after him/her the majority of the time.

As you probably know, the worst position to be in is the UTG (Under The Gun) because the player sitting there will be the first to act in the preflop betting round. The best possible position is in the button, because the button is the last to act on pretty much every street. The cut-off (the position on the immediate right of the button), is not a bad position to be in either, as it has the power to mess up the button’s blinds-stealing plans, in case the other players fold around or call.

Here are some of the advantages that being in late position offers you:
- You’ll gain plenty of information on your opponents without having to pay for it, and you’ll be able to make your reads before it’s your turn to act.
- The bluffing opportunities that being in late position offers you are quite endless. You’ll be able to pull off some pretty cheeky bluffs without getting caught and thus you’ll make a lot of free money in late position.
- You’ll also be able to gauge the size of your value bets more accurately, and thus you won’t end up losing money on account of making the incorrect size raise.
- Most importantly: being in position will allow you to control the size of the pot. In layman terms: you’ll be able to keep the pot small when you’re pushing a weak drawing hand and you’ll be able to build the pot if you have a monster.

Knowing how to use position to your advantage at the poker table is like rakeback: it is among the most elementary ways to secure a lasting edge.
Signing up for a deal like the full tilt rakeback or the ongame rakeback is like money in the bank: if you play, it’ll guarantee you an additional revenue-stream.

Suited connectors, together with suited one-gappers and small pocket pairs are excellent hands in deep stacked cash games. The reason is that while they do not get hit by the flop that often, they carry excellent implied odds and when they do land a pot, it’s bound to be a huge one. The value is obviously in making flushes, straights, or – in the case of small pocket pairs – sets.

The only problem with these great implied odds hand is that they lose value fast in short-stacked situations.

Because MTTs and SNGs rarely offer players deep stacks, it’s fair to affirm that suited connects lose value in tournaments in quite a dramatic fashion.

Here’s why such implied odds hands tend to drop value in short stacked games: as I said above, the straights and the flushes that offer these hands their implied odds potential, come about fairly seldom. Exploiting the implied odds means that you have to invest and lose some money before you hit your hand and recover it all plus some on the side.

In a SNG or MTT, you cannot afford to make all those calls and lose all those chips, because those chips represent your tournament life and chances are you’ll bust out before you hit a hand that allows you to recover your losses.

Should you play suited connectors at all in tournaments then? While there’s less value in them, they are playable under certain circumstances. The first thing you need to consider when contemplating how to play your suited connectors is position. In order to make the decisions easier on yourself, as a general rule, do not play them from early position. If you’re in late position, you can sometimes play them.

In the early stages of a tournament, players have the deepest stacks compared to the size of the BB+SB. At this stage, your suited connectors still retain some value. You can play them from late position, especially if the other players check around to you.

In the middle stages of a tourney, the suited connectors are hardly playable, from late or from early position.

In the late stages of the event when things pretty much turn into a craps-shoot, there’ll be some blinds stealing value in suited connectors played from late position again.

Make sure you sign up for rakeback even if you only play in tournaments. The NoiQ rakeback deal or the Cereus rakeback deal offer you rake rebate on your tournament fees too.

Like it or not, in a tournament, you’ll be faced with several coin-flip situations. As a matter of fact, the further you advance in a tourney, the more such situations you’ll have to deal with. As the blinds escalate and the action loosens up, people will be forced to risk their tournament lives on such coin flips. First of all, let’s define what a coin-flip is in poker: when you go to a showdown vs another player with about 50% chances (at the time the money goes all in) to win. If you shove all in on your pocket Jacks against your opponent’s A,K, you’re in a coin-flip like this.

Now then, these coin-flips may carry a marginal EV+ in a cash game, where you can reload if you go bust, but in a tournament, where your survival is pinned on it, you’ve got another thing coming. Going for coin-flips is not the way to play cash games either – despite the marginal EV, but in tournaments, the flip is bad news, yet still it’s much more common there in the closing stages.

Nobody likes to pin his/her tournament hopes on the coin-flip, but desperate times call for desperate measures as they say and people who do it usually do it out of necessity.

In a cash game, the adverse odds are a clear indicator of what you have to do: save your money until a more favorable circumstance arises for the investment. In a tournament, you simply cannot do that. The escalating blinds will force you into the corner sooner or later, and going all-in on a coin-flip will become your best chance for survival.

Now then, what exactly can you do to optimize your coin-flip odds? Can you do anything at all? You certainly can. While whether to go for the flip or not is not a choice you can make, when you go for a flip is a different matter altogether.

Coin flip situations always involve two people who start out with equal odds – though only apparently so. There’s a subtle factor at work here, called the fold equity. The fold equity gives a considerable advantage to the person shoving all in, over the guy making the call. Think about it like this: you make the shove and then wait for the other guy to make up his mind whether he wants to call it or not. There’s a chance that he’ll fold and give you the pot right there. If you’re the guy who’s brainstorming about whether or not to make the call, there is no such option. Once you make the call, it’s all in there and you’ve pretty much surrendered yourself to Lady Luck’s caprices.

Therefore, the first coin-flip lesson is: be the aggressor instead of being the one pushed around. That will secure you some extra fold equity.

Accurately assessing the value of your starting hand is the second coin-flip lesson. Remember, a coin-flip is supposed to be a 50-50 split and not a 30-70 one. Easily dominated hands will often have you trapped on the wrong end of this equation, and you’ll find yourself praying to get lucky enough to make it at least a coin-flip.

A classic example in this sense would be the A, bad kicker vs any truly coin-flip hand (Like Q,K suited). Now, your A,2 suited may be better than a coin-flip against a K,Q suited, but if you consider that your opponent may also hold an Ace, you’ll see that you are in fact on the 30% end of this match-up.

The deuce means that any other hand with an A in it has you thoroughly dominated. The conclusion is, that you have to have a pretty good read on your opponent before you decide to go to a coin-flip with him. You have to know the approximate range he’s willing to push all-in on, otherwise you just won’t be able to pick your spot well. Take a small pocket pair for instance. That’s a hand which is better than a coin-flip on anything but a higher pocket pair. If you run it into a higher pocket pair though, you can pretty much stop dreaming about your 50-50 match-up.

Give your coin-flip all-in serious thought before you commit and sign up for rakeback. A rakeback deal like the Full Tilt rakeback or the Ultimate Bet rakeback will give you a 27-30% long term edge over all your rakeback-less competitors.