Every now then you’ll come across a rakeback site offering astonishingly high rakeback percentages. I’m talking about 100, 110 or even 135% rakeback. In this case, you’re either dealing with a scam artist (you’ll be able to tell that by how serious the website looks), or – more likely – you’re seeing prop deals being offered. What exactly is a prop deal and how can poker rooms afford to offer such generous deals to their players? These are the questions I’ll try to answer.

Prop deals are usually offered by new start-up poker rooms. The reason? They need to establish their critical liquidity as fast as possible or they’ll never give themselves a chance to get started in the industry.

Players who sign up for a prop deal become the “employees” of the site. The task for these guys will be to attain and to maintain this critical player liquidity. A poker room has attained critical player liquidity once there are always sufficient players at pretty much all the featured limits. This way, new sign-ups won’t turn around and leave at the sight of the empty tables and the poker room will be able to grow automatically. In order to fulfill this very important task, poker rooms will pay their prop players a “wage” in the form of the overly generous rake rebate deals presented above.

Prop players will have to fulfill certain obligations in order to qualify for their rakeback. For instance, they won’t be allowed to wait in queue at a full table. Their role is after all to generate action, not to take advantage of what’s already set up.

Certain limits will not be accessible for poker props. They’ll be constrained to play at certain tables and limits sometimes, and if the poker room considers they should head on over to the Omaha tables instead of the Holdem ones, they need to do so.

Prop players will often be required to sign in through IM with the shift-manager who will acknowledge their presence and willingness to prop. The shift manager will seldom contact players though, unless he needs to direct them somewhere or unless they commit something contrary to the propping rules.

Despite the above said restrictions, many prop players who had been long-term losers before, became winners due to these extremely generous rakeback offers. Signing up for a prop deal is as easy as signing up for a rakeback deal. Make sure though that you follow the rules and do not break the restrictions or you’ll have your rakeback withheld.