Freeroll Tourneys

Freerolls are multi table poker tournaments (MTTs) which require no real money buy-ins yet offer real money prizes or rewards like seats in a high buy-in events, or in a live event satellite.

Before you get all worked up about the possibility of making money without any sort of investment needed (other than your time of course), let’s take a realistic look at the opportunities offered by these freerolls.

There are several types of freerolls: those that offer really valuable prizes are generally not available to all comers though. These freerolls are mostly reserved to depositing players, or players who earn their entries by generating a given number of VIP points or such.

Some freerolls are available to all comers though. These offer such small prize-pools (compared to the number of registrants) that even a win in one of these wouldn’t give you much more than a flimsy bankroll-start. For that purpose though, freerolls are excellent. Finish in the money a few times in these freerolls and you have the start of a bankroll, which you can then take to the SNG tables to expand.

How do freerolls shape up strategy-wise? They’re MTTs after all, so standard MTT strategy should be the way to go, right? Well, yes and no. The fact that there are no stakes involved for the participants induces some pretty interesting (and often exploitable) differences between freeroll and real money MTT play. In real money buy-in tournaments, people have a part of their bankroll to protect. They sign up for rakeback deals to get some of their tournament fees back (go to Rakemeback.com for the best rakeback deals like the pacific poker Rakeback) , and they go out of their way to protect their stacks when at the table.

Freerolls are different. Some people apparently only register for these events to annoy the other participants. Others have a pretty remarkable way to approach it: they shove all-in on the first reasonable hand they pick up, in an attempt to double up. If they double up, they’ll tighten back up right away, if they get bounced they’ll figure at least they didn’t waste their time. Dealing with these two types of players is something you’ll never be faced with in a real money MTT, and you have to develop special ways to cope with the situation in freerolls.

Being extra tight/aggressive is what most experts recommend that you do in the early stages of a MTT. Being tight is exactly what you need in a freeroll’s early stages too, though you need to be ready to get truly radical about it. I’ll give you an example to illustrate what I’m talking about: suppose you pick up a pair of rockets in the button during the opening levels of a real money MTT. One guy shoves all-in in front of you, and you’re so glad he does: you have the best hand and the best odds. He probably has K,K or Q,Q unless – worst case scenario – he has the other pair of rockets in which case you’ll split.

You pick up the same pair of rockets in a freeroll’s early going, and 4 players shove all-in in front of you. Like it or not, in this situation, you’re better off letting go of your rockets, despite the fact that you probably do have the best hand at the table at that point. People go all-in on all sorts of junk in freerolls, and when faced with that multitude of drawing hands, your rockets’ odds take a serious hit. While in a cash game you should still make the call, despite the diminished odds, in a tournament, where your stack represents your life-line, the decision is a more complex one.

Once you reach a certain stage in a freeroll and the field gets rid of the rogue elements, you can sink back into your regular MTT routine (stealing blinds when they get large enough, exploiting the lull on the money bubble etc)