Poker Freerolls
You may have heard the term ‘freeroll’ in relation to poker. Freerolls are GREAT – especially if you are new to the game, or trying to get your friends & family interested in the beautiful game of poker.
What is a poker freeroll?
A poker freeroll is a free-to-enter poker tournament (multi-table or single-table) featuring a prize-pool offering some form of tangible value (e.g tournament tickets, cash, merchandise or other stuff).
Poker.com runs a daily MILLION freeroll, with a prizepool of 1M Satoshis. Entry is free.
Freerolls are of interest and of value to poker players for a number of reasons:
- Risk-Free Bankroll building – Given that these are free poker tournaments – you aren’t compelled to wager a cent. All you need to invest is time and skill in order to win a little cash to increase your bankroll, and to enable you to take a shot at real-money cashgames, sit and go tournaments or MTTs. Some of the most prolific tournament poker players began their poker journeys by building their bankrolls with freerolls (e.g. Annete “Annette_15” Obrestad, Chris Moorman, and Ben “JenBizzle” Jones) before winning millions of dollars online playing real-money poker tournaments.
- Freerolls are a great Sandbox for learning the rules of poker- If you are a newbie to the beautiful game of poker, it is much more equitable and fun to find out that your straight doesn’t beat a flush in a tournament that you haven’t paid an entry fee for! Playing lots of freerolls will give you first hand experience of almost every situation you are likely to encounter at the poker table. As a beginner you are bound to make mistakes – and of course it’s better to make them and learn from them at no negative cost.
- Confidence building – It can be intimidating jumping into real-money games before you have some confidence. Playing a bunch of freerolls is sure to make your more confident and experienced – and will certainly give you a lot of experience of bad-beats – as the players are generally not very skilled at poker in these games and can show up with some crazy hands / play some crazy lines that you probably wouldn’t see in real-money poker games.
- Availability – Poker sites use freerolls to reward players and to attract new players. To that end, most online poker sites offer at least a couple of freerolls per day (some of the larger sites, such as PokerStars, PartyPoker and Bet365 offer LOTS of freerolls per day)
- “Grinding” is rewarded with exclusive freeroll rewards – Some sites offer loyalty programs to their players which include access to exclusive freerolls – often with prize pools in the thousands of dollars.
- A catalyst for getting Friends + family into poker – It’s easy to get friends and family involved and sharing the fun and excitement poker when you show them they can join you on the virtual-felt and play for free in some freerolls. Maybe they will knock you out of the tournament! Anything can happen on the poker table!
- Community – There are a number of gambling and poker forums and online communities online which run exclusive private freerolls to reward their members with added value for being a part of the community (these games are often protected with a freeroll password),
What makes a good freeroll?
Put simply- the best poker freerolls offer the most value per player. To work out the value per player, use this simple formula: Value per player = prize pool/#players
Here are two separate scenarios:
Freeroll 1: 1,000 players are registered, the prizepool is $2,000. – seat is worth $2 to the player
Freeroll 2: 10,000 players are registered, the prizepool is $10,000. – seat is worth $1 to the player
Which tournament is better? It doesn’t just depend on the seat value – the payout structure of each tournament is also a consideration, but generally freerolls will pay at least the top 10% players in the field, with the bulk of the prize pool reserved for the top-finishers. A win in the $10k freeroll may not be 10x as hard just because it has 10x as many players – and it will certainly reward 1st place with a bigger prize pool…
where can I find poker freerolls ?
First step is to visit our online freeroll tracker to view our updated list of upcoming freerolls across all poker brands. Once you find a freeroll in our trackr, simply download one of the top poker sites we recommend on our homepage and once you have registered your real-money account, navigate to the poker lobby and use the filters to sort the upcoming games by buy-in (ascending order) to see upcoming freerolls, or use the tournament type filter in the poker client.
Alternatively there are a numberhttp://online freerollshttps://poker.com/online-poker-freerolls/ of good poker freeroll database websites online which list upcoming freerolls for a multitude of poker sites – saving you from having to load up 10 different poker clients to find some free-poker that is actually worth playing!
Summary
Freerolls are great for learning poker and building a small bankroll before moving into low or mid-stakes poker games. You can find freerolls and play-money games running 24/7 on our recommended poker sites.
Good luck on the tables