Money for Nothing

The old saying "It takes money to make money" is not exactly true when it comes to poker. Many online poker sites offer freerolls: tournaments where players do not have to pay anything to enter but will still pay out real money to the winners. Usually the payouts are pretty small and since it doesn't cost anything to enter, sometimes the number of competitors is enormous, but freerolls offer a very rare thing: the chance to win a little without risking anything.

One of the reasons I like playing on Full Tilt is that they offer a lot of freerolls. Pretty much every hour, a freeroll starts. Most of them will only (only!) take a maximum of 7,600 players and out of that massive field only the top 45 finishers will be in the money, with prizes ranging from about $14 for first down to about $1.50 for 45th place. With such a large field, you would have to finish in the top half of one percent of players to getting anything at all! Even if you don't put any money into them, these bigger freerolls still usually demand a large time investment; taking about five hours to play from start to final table.

With such slim odds and such a long time commitment to win such small amounts of money, it is not surprising that a lot of people regard freerolls as a waste of time. Are they? Anette Obrestad was a fifteen-year-old Norwegian girl who (it is claimed) never deposited any money into on-line poker, but with money she won in freerolls went on to win amass over $800,000 before she turned eighteen.

And not all freerolls have such big fields and slim odds as the hourly tournaments I mentioned earlier. Full tilt has a daily tournament where the entry free is $500,000 in play money, and $40 in real money is divided among the top 18 finishers ($5 for first, $3 for second and $2 for everyone who finishes 3rd to 18th). I played it the other day - guess how many players were in it? 32. That's right - more people finished in the money that not. (For the record, I came in 8th). While some might not say this is exactly a freeroll since I had to put up $500,000 in play money, in my mind $500,000 in play money is worth about, oh, I'd say $0 in real money. So yeah, I'd call this a freeroll.