Freeroll Strategy
The most interesting advantage of freeroll poker tournaments is the fact that you can practice a variety of different tournament theories and poker strategy plans without having the added pressure of finishing in the money to recover your buy-in amount. There are many different theories for playing in freeroll.
- This is a discussion on Freeroll strategy within the online poker forums, in the Tournament Poker section; What's your best strategy in freerolls? Do you start with a few allins in order to become.
- Freeroll Strategy Freerolls are, as the name suggests, free-to-enter online poker tournaments which are laid on to attract casual players and to help you to build a bankroll. Most big poker sites will offer daily or weekly freerolls with $1,000 or $2,000 prizepools up for grabs.
In the world of poker, there is no one version of the game. There are a lot of games that come under the poker umbrella. Texas Hold’em, Rummy, 32 Card Draw, Omaha, 7 Card Stud and more. All these games have a different way of playing and to play them well you will need a lot of practice. These games can be practiced using the option of poker freeroll tournament. These are the most common tournaments people play to get their plays and strategies right. Before we move onto the guide for freeroll strategies let us read about what freerolls are.
Freerolls are games where people can enter without paying most often and if they win they stand to win the pot money. A freeroll usually occurs in two forms: one where a hand in which players can split the pot in two or win and second when there is a tournament without a monetary fee. A split happens typically when two players are playing heads up poker. The second is usually a tourney where the player has certain entry requirements but no fee to enter. The pot money is usually put up by the sponsor and is won by whoever finishes the game.
Now that you have understood the game and when a freeroll occurs. Let us read a few strategy tips you can use to play poker.
Poker Strategy Freeroll Password
The early stages are important:
In every poker game, the initial stages are crucial to form a base of the rest of the game. Similarly, in freerolls too because people have not paid to get into tournaments they are willing to take risks in the early stages and build their stack. Owing to this the first principle is to as tight as you can in the initial stages. Play your strong hands first and keep the weak ones for later when you have built up your stack. Eventually, there will be a lot of dropouts from the game. Therefore, to be successful you should keep calm, make a good decision, and be prepared to play your best.
Never go all-in early:
When playing freerolls you will find that there are a lot of players going all-in during the early stages and this will make a lot of people go on tilt. Looking at other people go all-in you might feel like you are not doing enough or playing correctly. But this is not true, keep calm and be patient before you jump to make decisions. Online poker freerolls will give you the experience you need to play poker properly.
Play smart, not fancy:
At freeroll tables, you will come across several players that are amateurs and do not know how to play poker. Playing fancy and using all your smart moves on players that barely understand the game is not a smart move. See their level of understanding and observe their play. Playing fancy might only get you called more often than not.
The middle stage:
After having made it through the beginning you need to now shift gears and play the middle stages a little more aggressively. Out of all the players on the table, a lot of players leave the games in the initial stages. Since you are close to the money a lot of players will lose their cool and make reckless decisions. Be patient and play a little more aggressively during this stage.
Bluff on the bubble:
The players at the table have now invested too much time, patience, and efforts to get to the bubble. They will not leave without trying their best to get all that money. This is when you can push your opponents a little more and bluff. Use bluff only when you are sure of the strategy.
Finally, you fight through the last stage and get that money with the help of a strong strategy and a great hand. With several online poker games being offered, you need to get your strategies right to play and win.
One of the ways that a poker site tries to attract people to their site rather than the competition is to offer poker players what they have fantasized about since first seeing the game on TV: A huge tournament. Most legal US online poker sites found on our website offer what is called a freeroll, as this is a tournament where you can literally enter without having to put any money down and win actual prizes. The prizes offered will vary ranging from $100 up to $5000 in total prize money. Some of these freerolls are actually satellite tournaments, where winning the freeroll will buy your entry into a huge tournament either on the site or on location somewhere at a place like Vegas. It's easy to see why these tournaments are so popular on poker sites. Most sites will host a few per day.
As Chris 'Jesus' Ferguson proved some years ago, a poker player can enter a poker site with $0, do well in freerolls, and roll that money over and have over $10,000 in their account in under a year. However, you need to know how to navigate the tough terrain of a freeroll. Donkeys and lucky draws and players not caring about risking their spot because they didn't pay anything to get in; this is a minefield. You probably will not win; the odds are against it. However, with the right strategy, and a little luck, you can put yourself in a position to finish in the money; and if you're in a good chip position when the payout threshold is broken, you may be able to switch gears and school the competition en route to a victory. A lot of ifs, some of which are pretty big ifs, but it all starts with strategy.
Understand the Flow of a Freeroll/Free Satellite
Playing Freeroll Strategy
Understand how the freeroll is going to work. This is the first thing you have to get your head around. You're playing in a tournament that cost no money to enter, and so more than half the people there are just going to be killing time or having fun. About 10% of the crowd will probably not even be present, with an 'Away' sign over their avatar. Then you have a hefty chunk of players who simply want to push their chips in every hand in an attempt to get lucky. As we mentioned earlier, and we'll reiterate here, you probably won't win a freeroll. But you can, with some luck and skill, navigate your way to the money finish. And it all starts with understanding what you're in for. You cannot enter into a freeroll and play with the donkeys, nor can you adopt a big-money strategy where you sit and wait. You have to be a predator without running with the pack.
Poker Freeroll Strategy
If you are able to understand how to do this, then you might just survive a few blind levels and work your way up the chip leader charts. And that's a very important part about freerolls. The number-one reason you cannot wait around forever picking your spots is that the action is forced by doubling blinds every 7 minutes or so, which is basically every 3 to 4 hands on average. Just when you think your $1,700 stack is looking decent to get you through the first few rounds of bust-outs, those blinds get up to $150-$300 and you don't even have 10x the BB and will be forced into action. This is where you need to adopt the lone wolf (predator) strategy, which we will explain directly below.
Be an Early Aggressor
View yourself as a tiger out there on the African plains. You see a group of other tigers all chasing the same group of gazelles, but you see a couple of soft-target gazelles in the distance. Don't run with the pack. You're liable to miss out on getting your fill. Be a lone predator and chase your prey independent of the pack. In a poker context, this means going into a freeroll with the idea of being an early aggressor. Not too early, mind you; allow a few hands for the biggest donkeys to weed themselves out. Within the first blind level, 90% of the novices and maniacs are culled from the herd, and the other 10% have tripled their stacks or better and have put the brakes on, thinking they can win. They'll become our whipping posts later on. For right now, it's about being that tiger.
Try to wait, if you can, until you have decent table position early on in the tournament. If you have folded to this point, it gives you three distinct advantages. One, people know you're not a donkey and that if you push in, you probably have a good pocket. Two, you have seen which players act in which fashion. Three, you see who limps in and who raises; e.g. if people are raising you up, wait until the next hand. So, let's say it's the 7th hand, about 200 people have busted out already, and you get a K-J off-suit in decent position and no one has raised a lot. In a real-money tournament you would never do this, but you have to eat or be eaten in a freeroll. You have to push your chips out there and take a risk. More often than not, you're only going to get one or two bites at this point, and anyone who limped into the pot probably doesn't have a better pocket than you do. This in no way means you'll win, but having the better pocket pre-flop does mean that you're going to have a better chance of winning.
Now, if you don't get the cards to push, go ahead and wait another go-'round for position, hoping some luck finds you. But you need to act quickly here, within the first few rounds of play. If you're able to do this correctly without suffering a bad beat, then you'll be looking at least at a double-up, if not a triple-up, and will be in a good position to actually start playing poker. Yes, this strategy can put you right out of the tournament. But it's a necessity to do well in a freeroll. If you're not doubling up in the first few rounds, the blinds will eat you. If you double only having $300, you still only have $600, and the next round of blinds eats you again. You'll live in a perpetual state of short stack, and the time you think you have a good hand is when someone has pocket aces. Be a lion early and eat your meal! Even if it doesn't work this time, it will next time. All of the sites we've reviewed on www.legalbettingonline.com have multiple freerolls during the day.
Play Strong From Position
This step is assuming that the previous has worked out well for you and that you now have around $3,000 or so in chips. As you look at the leader boards, you're probably going to see some players with $12, $15, and even $20k in chips. The goal here with this strategy is to get to the middle of the road, where blinds aren't a concern, and to start playing poker. After you have a bit of chip security, you can relax a bit and just start playing hands on their merits and playing off of your opponents. For instance, if you have read any of our strategy articles before, then you know it's basically mandatory to scope your competition and to see how they play. For instance, does player 6 check-raise after a flop every time? Does player 8 limp into pots and then call everything down? Does player 2 raise pre-flop but then fold immediately after a bet? Players give away their tendencies if you look hard enough. To use another tiger analogy, they cannot change their stripes. Now that you have some chips, you want to start seeing more flops, especially from position, and making players pay for getting into the hands with you.
If you're in a hand with that player who check-raises every time, and you have a good hand, make him prove that he's got the goods. Re-raise him, putting the pressure back on him, and one of two things are going to happen that are good for you. He's either going to fold, or he's going quickly throw all-in. Folding is great, but you might be worried about the all-in. Don't be; this is a scare tactic. If he actually had a hand, he'd be wanting to play for pot odds, unwilling to scare away good chips. This is something to keep in mind. It's not universal, but 9 times out of 10 that someone just throws all-in instantly, the odds that they have a winning hand are slim to none. If they had a winner, they would try to extract chips from as many players as possible; they wouldn't want everyone to fold. In the event the player simply calls, then allow it to go to a check on the final river, as he may be betting for value here and will not be put off the hand.
Play strong from good table position (the blinds and the button) and don't be fooled by players who wear their tendencies like T-shirts. There's always a chance they will outdraw you on a river, but the odds are in your favor if only you play statistically solid poker. Working your way up through the middle levels gives you about a 40% boost every winning hand, as the blinds are getting larger now. Barring any bad beats or bonehead moves on your part, you should be able to flip that $3k into $10k or so, as you prepare for the final push. You still want to be aggressive here, growing at your dinner, but do so from a strong position where you get to dictate the final say.
Survey New Tables and Typecast the Competition
One very common occurrence in a freeroll is that your table will be changed randomly. We call this getting drafted, but it's simply the automated system of the tournament resitting the tables based on the number of players still alive. You can't have 30 tables going with 4 players on each. They have to shrink this down. When this happens to you, which it will if you survive long enough, just relax and survey the field. Unless you get a killer pocket in the first couple of hands, or unless they throw you into the blinds where you can limp in, don't play hands. Even if you have a mid-level pair, sacrifice it to get a read on other players. See which players are aggressive, which are passive, which know what they're doing, etc. Remember, in poker it's much more than the cards you're dealt; it's the players. If you look around the table and cannot spot the sucker, you're the sucker. It's as simple as that.
Now, you're not going to become an expert on every player, but in a few hands you will learn who the aggressors are and who the tight players are. This is to your advantage when you do play a hand because you will know the difference between a chip bully posturing and someone who may have a good hand. At this point in a freeroll, you can let your skills shine and the chips fall where they may. Don't engage with a chip bully if you don't have the goods, but if you do have the goods, do not back down. You have to take a stand as soon as you can, or else it will be in your mind that you can just wait for a better spot. And that better spot may never come. Poker players typically fall into 'types,' and in freerolls you have donkeys (the loose players), bullies (the guys who just push pots up constantly), the silent majority (the players who, like you, try to pick their spots), and the sheeple (players who wait around trying to get pocket aces and end up blinding out). The idea in this leg of the tournament is to blend in with the table dynamic, stepping up and claiming pots when you have the position and the cards to do so. Bigger stacks might try to pick on you if you're weaker, but pick your spots and show them that you're not about to back down. After the bully gets hit a time or two, he'll shrink up and protect his stack. He's only the bully with chips; with a shorter stack, he's a surefire seat-warmer on the rail.
Downshift in Later Rounds
Okay, so you've followed the strategy thus far, you look at the leaderboards, and there's only 14 players remaining. You're already in the money, having cashed for a few bucks, but now you might be able to grind to a final table. In big-money tournaments, where players actually have to put in real cash, this is the point where everyone tightens up and just tries to survive. In freerolls, however, this is the point where people are trying to make double-ups for the final table. So be careful of stepping into all-ins. People who got in for free can live with a $5 payout, so they view it as a no-risk maneuver to slam their chips into the middle of the table with only two tables left. Downshift from your aggressive, predator style of play and shift into real-money mode. Gauge the competition; make cold, calculated moves; don't engage with people out of position or without the cards.
You're now all about playing a game of position and timing. Let the weaker players weed themselves out, or at least least expose themselves to you. Make sure you engage only when in a statistically strong position to do so. But don't be afraid to tangle with anyone if you have position and power. You don't want to revert to being a bully, but you also do not want to be a pushover. Take your time, pick your spots, and do you damage. With a little luck, you can make it to that final table and perhaps have a shot at winning it all.
Be advised when using this strategy that this is only a freeroll strategy. Any other tournament structure will be vastly different, and you should not attempt to use this strategy for any other style of game.