GGPoker rake, rakeback, and the Ocean Rewards math a bot farm runs

Fish Buffet is now Ocean Rewards

If you type the old promotion address, ggpoker.com/promotions/fish-buffet/, the site sends you to ggpoker.com/promotions/ocean-rewards/. The help centre has dropped the Fish Buffet name entirely; the loyalty articles now sit under a Promotions & Rewards category called Ocean Rewards. So a search for "GGPoker Fish Buffet" lands on a program that no longer uses the term. Older guides may quote Fish Buffet star counts and payouts as if they were current.

The shape of the program carried over. You still earn points from play, those points still move you up tiers, and a higher tier still improves what you get back. The vocabulary changed: points are Tide Points, the reward currency is Gems, and the tiers are a food chain rather than a buffet. The parts that mattered to a grinder (rewards scaling with volume and status) survived the rename. What I could read on 6 November 2026 came from GGPoker's own help-centre articles, not from the promo page, which is a client-rendered app that loads its numbers through its own back end.

What GGPoker publishes about rake, and what it keeps in the client

The Cash Games help article has a "Rake and Contributions" section. It defines rake as "the small fee taken by the house from the pot," states that pre-flop rake "is only taken pre-flop in pots that involve a 3-bet or higher," and counts a hand as raked "for any player who has voluntarily contributed chips to the pot." These rules explain how rake is charged but give no percentage or cap.

The percentage and the cap, the figures a grinder needs to work out an hourly, are shown per stake in the client lobby, not on any web page or help article I could find. That is a deliberate split. The mechanics are public so that any player can understand what a raked hand is; the rate is held where you see it only once you are seated. The table lists where to find rake and rewards information, based on the GGPoker pages I read on 6 November 2026.

Everything that explains the system is published. Every rate that would let you compute a return is not.

The eight Ocean Rewards tiers and how status is set

The Tiers help article states that "the program consists of eight distinct status tiers." In order, from the bottom: Fish, Shrimp, Crab, Turtle, Octopus, Dolphin, Whale, Shark. Your tier is set by the Tide Points you earn across a calendar year, 1 January to 31 December. The article adds that "Tide Points do not decay" within the year but "reset to zero on January 1st of each year," so the climb starts over every January.

Two things shape how a high-volume account behaves. Status is sticky: "a player's status at 00:00 UTC on January 1st is locked in for the coming year," so a tier reached late in one year holds through the next, with no mid-year downgrade. Holding a tier takes ongoing volume. The article's worked example is that "a Turtle Tier player must earn at least 200,000 Tide Points in a year to maintain that status." That 200,000 is the only tier threshold GGPoker prints. The points required for the tiers above Turtle are not on the public pages, so I will not guess them.

Why the reward rate is hard to pin down

The Tide Points article is explicit that rake is not a straight multiplier. Allocation "in Poker games is primarily based on the amount of rake or fees generated," but GGPoker "utilises an approach that considers several factors," and it lists them: Play History and Game Selection, Opponent Diversity, Deposit and Withdrawal History, and Participation in Features and Promotions. The only earn rate it commits to a number is the casino one ("on average, a $1 bet on Slots will earn 4 Tide Points, and a $3 Bet on Casino Games will earn 4 Tide Points"), with the caveat that "exact earning rates vary from game to game."

Gems work the same way. The Gems article says the currency's accumulation "is directly tied to their current tier; higher tiers benefit from increased earning rates," and that climbing tiers adds "Gem Multipliers," but that "detailed information regarding the specific multiplier for each tier can be found in the Ocean Rewards section of the app." Gems themselves "never decay or expire," though tournament tickets bought with Gems "expire after 365 days." So the full chain from a dollar of rake to a dollar of reward runs through two private rates: how many Tide Points that rake earns, and how fast your tier turns activity into Gems. Neither is published.

What a volume program does to a bot farm's math

A loyalty program pays you back a slice of the rake you generate, and a bot farm exists to generate rake at scale: many seats, many tables, around the clock, for months. More hands produce more rake, more rake produces more points, more points lift the tier, and a higher tier returns a larger share. For many farm operators the rewards, not the pots, are the edge: bots can break even at the tables and still profit on what comes back.

GGPoker's four allocation factors also describe farm activity. This is my reading of the public wording, not a statement from GGPoker about how it targets bots. "Opponent Diversity" is a problem for a farm whose accounts keep meeting the same small pool, or each other. "Play History and Game Selection" describes a signature a 24/7 table-picking script leaves. "Deposit and Withdrawal History" is where an agent operation moving money through many accounts shows up. With the calendar-year reset and the unpublished rate, there is nothing fixed to optimise against. You cannot tune a rakeback-farming operation to a percentage you are never shown, and the rate can be throttled for an account that reads as a farm without GGPoker changing a single public figure.

Volume-based rewards attract farms. The discretionary, factor-weighted allocation also assesses the behaviour of accounts pursuing those rewards. How that behaviour is turned into a detection decision sits with the security model covered in the detection note, and what GGPoker has actually enforced, with dates, is in what GGPoker has said publicly about bots. Why the raw online-player counts cannot be used to size any of this is in the traffic note.

The numbers GGPoker does not put on the web

I could not source the following from any public GGPoker page and cannot state them as facts:

• The rake percentage and cap for any specific cash-game stake. These are shown in the client lobby per table.
• How many Tide Points a dollar of poker rake earns. The article names factors, not a rate.
• The Gem multiplier for each tier. The Gems article points to the app for these.
• The Tide Point thresholds for every tier except Turtle, whose 200,000-per-year maintenance figure is the one published example.

If you play on GGPoker now and can share a current screenshot of a stake's rake and cap, or of the Gem multiplier on your tier, send it through the contact button and I will add it here with the date and the stake it came from.

The GGPoker pages behind this note

• GGPoker, Ocean Rewards promotion page, ggpoker.com/promotions/ocean-rewards/ (reached via a redirect from /promotions/fish-buffet/), read 6 November 2026
• GGPoker Help Centre, Tiers - Frequently Asked Questions, help.ggpoker.com, read 6 November 2026
• GGPoker Help Centre, Tide Points - Frequently Asked Questions, read 6 November 2026
• GGPoker Help Centre, Gems - Frequently Asked Questions, read 6 November 2026
• GGPoker Help Centre, Cash Games - Frequently Asked Questions, "Rake and Contributions", read 6 November 2026