If you’re only now thinking about becoming an online poker player (for fun or for whatever other reason) you’re going to need a quick-briefing to avoid many of the mistakes beginners usually make. First of all, before you even sign-up: consider registering for a rake rebate deal. Rakemeback.com has plenty of such deals and by checking out pokerprops.com, you may even decide to go for all the marbles and play completely rake free. Never mind that you don’t really understand what the poker rake and rakeback is. Trust me on this one, this is something you’re going to be extremely thankful for later on in your online poker career.

Ok, now on to actual poker strategy. Is poker a game of chance or one of skill? People much smarter than yours truly have had trouble finding the answer to that question for quite a while now, so I won’t venture into the bogs on that one. I’ll just say that in the short-term, it can indeed be considered gambling. After all, one has no control over the cards he gets, neither over those that are dealt onto the board. You may have the best hand one minute and your opponent may hit a runner-runner two outer to knock you out of the tournament: it all comes with the turf in poker. The long-run is a different matter though. Over the long-run, good decisions pile up and the positive EV (expected value) that they bring about surfaces in a visible manner, meaning that if you play well, you’ll end up a long-term winner. You’re mathematically guaranteed to be a winner, but in order to cash in that guarantee, you need to get several things right.

Holdem is a game in which the best hand always wins. Unlike Omaha, Holdem is just not suited for a hi/lo split structure. Your objective is therefore to make the best hand and you need to play towards that objective from the second you pick up your hole cards. You will not be able to play a high percentage of your hole cards: only about 18-19% are worthy of committing chips on, and while that may not be a large number, that’s exactly what you’re going to have to deal with. This is called starting hand selection and it should be an integral part of your preflop strategy. Preflop poker is meant to make your post flop decisions easier, and it’s the starting hand selection where everything begins.

Keep an eye on your opponents. While online play is relatively tight, in a live casino, players will often play around 30% of their starting hands. That is way too much and you can take advantage of that. Subpar starting hands make weak hands after he flop, thus complicating your opponents’ post flop lives, and creating opportunities for you.

As soon as the flop lands, the majority of the community cards become known to all players around the table, Read the board right and keep an eye not just on your opponent’s range but also on your own perceived range.

Be aware of the fact that probably the most important thing in Texas Holdem is position. Early is bad, late is good, being the last to act is the best. Playing hands from late position will always make everything simpler for you as you’ll always pick up valuable information on your opponents without giving them anything in return. Everything in Holdem molds after your position. Starting hand selection, post flop action and everything in between. Even bluffs are easier to pull off when you have position on your opponent.

Tournaments and coin-flips: they go hand in hand like a horse and carriage. You can’t play in a tournament and expect to finish deep or to win it without taking a few coin-flips. There’s just one problem with these coin-flips though: every reasonable and successful player hates them. The coin-flip is when you give up control in favor of Lady Luck, and we all know that’s not the way to become a winning player.

First of all, what exactly is a poker coin-flip? A coin flip happens when you shove all your chips into the middle on a hand in which you know that the odds are approximately 50-50. A classic coin-flip example would be the J,J vs A,K match-up, or the K,Q vs A,10. Pretty much every low pair going up against an A,K is a coin-flip too. Taking such coin-flips early in the tournament when you do not have your back against the wall is a mistake. Taking coin-flips in cash games may sometimes carry a marginal long term EV+, but in tournaments, under normal circumstances, flipping for your tournament life is a grievous mistake. Still, towards the closing stages of poker tournaments, taking a coin-flip is often your best bet. When you’re down to a few BBs and you feel the action slipping away, looking for a coin-flip makes perfect sense. Even though the coin flip is supposed to be a 50-50 affair, there are ways you can better your odds when you take one. First of all, you need to make sure that the coin-flip you’re getting yourself into is indeed a coin-flip. Just because you think it is one, it may not necessarily be the case. Taking a 5,5 against your opponent’s A,A is definitely not a coin-flip. You need to have your reads right, and you need to keep your head on your shoulders, that’s about all you can do in this respect.

Even when you do get your coin-flip, you can still better your odds by being the aggressor instead of the passive caller. Aggression is usually rewarded in poker and calculated aggression is pure gold most of the time. The coin-flip is a clear example in this sense: in every all-in, there’s a player who initiates the event, the aggressor, and there’s a guy who makes the call. Say you have A,A and a guy ahead of you shoves all-in. You obviously make the call, but you’re not the aggressor. The fold equity is the little thing that rewards aggression in this instance and here’s how it works: the player who shoves all-in secures two ways to win the pot and to preserve his tournament life. He can either just win straight up with a little bit of help from Lady Luck, or he can force his opponent to fold, in which case the pot he takes down will be smaller, but he will stay alive. The person making the call doesn’t have two opportunities to win the hand: he needs to win it straight up.

When you’re looking to make the all-in move, try not to “go for value”. Getting several people into the hand on which you make your last stand kills your odds by allowing more drawing hands into the equation. What you want to do is to single out and isolate a player against whom you’re confident you’re going to get at least a coin-flip. Remember, regardless of how dire the situation may look, there’s always something you can do to improve on your odds a little. As a savvy poker player, you owe it to yourself and to the game to take full advantage of all such edges.

The fact that you just can’t seem to be able to climb above that red line in online 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 poker 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 poker 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. Poker 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 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 poker 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? A poker forum might give you hep in finding the best deal that suits you.

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.

Check out a poker forum for some more great info about playing online poker.

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 (or maybe even for a poker propping deal) 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 poker 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 (or maybe even for a poker prop 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.