Freerolls

The first step in my quest to turn $0.00 into $10,000 by playing online poker is to turn $0.00 into anything at all and that means playing in freeroll tournaments. For the uninitiated, freeroll tournaments are multi-table tournaments that cost nothing to enter but have a small prize pool that has been put up by the organiser. Some freeroll tournaments offer non-cash prizes to the winners and others act as satellites to bigger tournaments.

Freeroll tournaments differ from regular ‘pay tournaments’ in several important ways. The first thing you may notice when you enter a freeroll tournament is that the entrant fields are large, sometimes absolutely enormous. The largest fields I have seen so far have had 12,000 players all fighting for a $500 prize pool split into 260 paying positions. That’s 2.2% of the field, which is tiny when compared to most pay tournaments.

Once the tournament begins another feature of the freeroll No-Limit Hold’em tournament comes to light, people will move all-in pre-flop with any 2 cards. On the first hand at the table it is not uncommon to see 3 or more players going all-in and then turning over absolute trash. This will happen often during the tournament, but particularly during the first hour of play and I have found that it is better to play ultra-tight during first few levels and try to avoid the lunatics until they quieten down or (more often) get eliminated. So many people play recklessly during this opening period that losing up to 2/3 of the field in the first hour is normal. Of those players remaining, a good percentage of them will be absent – they never showed up for the tournament. This is both a blessing and a curse, by those players not showing up they have slimmed the field but it can make tournaments quite dull if you find yourself on a table with several ‘no-shows’.

To win a multi-table tournament at any level you need to get lucky, but with freerolls you need Lady Luck sitting on your lap just to make the paying positions, the large fields combined with the reckless ‘nothing to lose, everything to gain’ contingent makes these tournaments very slippery indeed and even when you do get lucky and make the paying positions you may only find yourself $0.30 richer after 3 hours of play, but from the thrifty beginner to those on a quest to make as much money as they can from nothing, these tournaments do provide the ultimate value for money if you have the patience and the discipline to see them through.

In the 2 days since I began this challenge I have played in a total of 8 freerolls across 3 poker sites and finished in the money exactly 0 times. The road ahead is long indeed.

 

BANKROLL – $0.00