Continuing with our series of articles explaining the different types of tournament, this post will concentrate on the Freeroll. If you’re new to the world of online poker and you’ve just joined an online casino after an exhaustive and thorough search for plethora of generous bonuses, you may now be ready to play poker for real money.
Some players though may not be entirely prepared for the nuances of gameplay and would like to be able to play a practice game with no money at stake. There are plenty of these games constantly running, usually termed play money games or something similar. However the best games to look out for are the Freerolls, it costs no money to enter and there will be a real cash prize at the end for the top finishers.
The big casinos will usually offer one big Freeroll tournament on a regular schedule, one a day or one a week perhaps, and it’s not unusual for several thousand players to be registered. In a tournament of this size a total prize pot of perhaps $100 may be awarded, spread out over the top 100 finishers. It’s a free to enter competition so the prizes are relatively small. Some casino run more lucrative Freerolls for new depositors or those who have collected a certain amount of loyalty points.
It’s set up as a multi-table tournament and as the number of players gets depleted, tables with fewer players get closed won and the competitors there get moved to another table. If you’re not desperate to dive in to cash games, Freerolls are a good place to start. Eventually you may win a couple of dollars so why not then use that money to play in a very low stakes tournament. In this way it is possible to slowly build up a bankroll while your gameplay improves.
Poker pro Chris Ferguson famously succeeded in turning zero dollars into $10,000 over a period of 16 months starting out by playing a few freerolls and following some basic rules. You may not be able to emulate Chris but you never know.
