If you play poker with your friends at home, all the money bet by you and your friends will go to the pot and the winner of the hand will win the pot in its entiretity.

If you are playing in a poker room or online, the organizer of the game will take their fee, a small %, of each pot to finance their operation. This is called rake.

The players relationship to rake & bonuses. 

 As a poker player your goal is to try and win as much money as possible. The best way to do this is by developping a killer poker skills. There is no substitute for that. With the introduction of online poker, poker has become immensely popular. Hundreds if not thousands of poker rooms are competing for the millions of customers online. They develop their sites and software to make it more attractive. As the gaming industry can be very a lucrative bussiness, the recent trend has been for the poker rooms to begin attracting customers by offering some of these profits back to the players. These include poker rooms for example offering to double your deposit. Its very generous on their behalf, but often is not unconditional. The condition usually is that you will have to generate some kind of points for example, before the money is "released". The details vary according to poker rooms and promotions.

The basic idea is that the poker room has calculated that by making sure the customer plays a certain amount the money offered is infact income the player generates to the poker room. So even the customer is most definately paying for his own bonus, it is still a win win situation in many if not all cases. If you choose to play poker, you must pay a fee. This fee is then returned to you in the form of a bonus.

The same applies to rake and rakeback. Rake is an unavoidable fee, a basic cost of playing poker. To attract customers a poker room may offer a % of the rake back to their customers. From the players perspective, it means that at the end of each month for example, they will receive X amount of dollars on top of their winnings or to help cover their losses. When you keep in mind that the players basic motivation is to win as much as possible, rakeback is quite positive.

How is rakeback calculated? 

Rake paid by any player is calculated in 1 of 2 ways. The dealt method and the contributed method. Dealt means that the total amount of rake gathered during a hand is divided equally between all players who were dealt in. Contributed is based on the actual amount each player has paid into the pot.  To calculate the amount of rakeback a player is to receive, the total amount of rake he generates during a month (thsi is often referred to as MGR - Monthly Gross Revenue) is multiplied by the rakeback . (MGR x rakeback% = rakeback USD). 

In most cases tournaments count towards rake, but by a fixed amount. For example if you play a 10USD sit and go, the tournament may actually cost 11USD to join, with the extra 1USD being the rake.

Deposit Bonuses & Rake

Reading all the instructions carefully or emailing the poker room will usually giove you all the answers here. The thing is that sometimes the bonuses you may receive, such as a deposit bonus are infact deducted from your MGR, and so your rake will be lower.

 
Proggressive Rakeback deals 

Some rakeback deals offer a flat rate of example 25% rakeback calculated from your MGR. Other offer a rakeback % taht increases progressively depensing on the amount of MGR generated. As the MGR goes up so does the rakeback you are to receive.