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Money for Nothing, Chips for Free

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 by Phil

This is the story of how I really got started as a webmaster… by pushing this idea of money for nothing and chips for free. It was all true too, I don’t think that I ever told a lie to anyone. I just forgot to mention how unlikely it is for the following scenarios to ever actually occur, so I suppose I should add a disclaimer… It’s very hard to do what is described below, and if you are able to do it, it is for short amounts of time and for small amounts of money. If you clicked on this entry because you really wanted money for nothing and you wanted to get your chips for free, you should hit the back button now before you are disappointed.

None the less, here is the actual breakdown of what I first started pushing in the poker affiliate industry. 

It’s all made possible because Full Tilt uses what is usually called the “Shared rake” method of calculating how much rake each player has paid. This basically means that the total rake for the pot is divided by the number of players who had cards dealt to them at the table. Even if those players folded their cards before putting any money into the pot, they are still included in this equation. The resulting number is credited to each player as the amount of rake that they have paid. In other words, they are all given credit for paying the same amount of rake in each hand no matter what happens.

For example if you are at a 6 handed table and a pot is raked for $3. As long as all 6 players were dealt cards in that hand, they will each receive credit for paying $.50 in rake. This means if you are getting rakeback, you are actually getting rakeback on rake that you haven’t paid. Now remember… these are very small numbers being discussed, don’t start thinking that you finally have a method of beating the game.

The next thing to understand is how to exploit this. There is really only 1 place to exploit this concept with any significance, and that is usually at the .05/.10 cash tables. These are the only tables that have a rake of 10% (or at least this was the case when I was a micro stakes grinder). Since the money is so inconsequential to most people at this level, folks will get crazy quite often at these tables and really pump the rake.

The calculations work out as such;

When the avg. pot reaches about $5.56 at a 9 handed table with blinds of $.05/$.10… you will be earning approx. 15 cents in rakeback for every round of blinds.

For those of you still following along, this means that when there are maniacs at your table, you can make enough money to pay for all of your blinds just by folding every hand. If folks get even crazier, you can start to make a profit just from the rakeback generated under Full Tilt’s calculation methods.

I’ve been told that I am wrong about this by many people, even some of the industries largest and most respected affiliates. The reason there is some confusion is because Full Tilt actually states that they use the contributed rake method…where you would only receive credit for paying rake when you had actually put money into the pot. However, if you read deeper into Full Tilt’s affiliate agreement, you will see that a players contributions are defined as I have done above.

Don’t forget what I said at the beginning of this article… this isn’t all it is cracked up to be. It would be fair to say that I was exploiting a rare situation I was able to come across. I mention it here mostly for entertainment purposes and to begin to tell the story of how Big Edge Poker came to be.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to move these color TVs.

EDIT: For those non-believers, here is a portion of bullet # 21 from Full Tilt’s affiliate agreement

“A Player’s contribution to the “rakes” shall be determined as the
quotient obtained when dividing the actual amount of each rake, in
hands which such Player was dealt in, divided by the total number of
persons playing at the table (“players”) at the start of the hand. By
way of example, if the rake in a hand with six players at the table is
three dollars ($3.00), each player’s contribution to the rake will be
fifty cents ($0.50).”