How to Build a Free Online Poker Bankroll
Unlike online casinos, poker sites are a lot less prone to handing out no deposit bonuses to their new players. If they did, players would be building bankrolls out of nothing on a daily basis. However, just because poker promotions rarely bestow a traditional no deposit bonus doesn’t mean that there is no way to build a bankroll without making a deposit.
The promotion you need to be looking for relates to open entry freeroll tournaments. A freeroll tournament is one that costs nothing to enter. They aren’t as easy to find as it may seem because a lot of them are promoted as “Points Freerolls”, requiring frequent player points (FPP) to enter. If you’ve just joined a poker site, you will not have any FPP to work with just yet.
Open entry freerolls have no pre-requisites, and will award either FPP or cash. Real money prizes are preferred for obvious reasons, but even those with FPP rewards are beneficial as they will give you the necessary points access to freerolls with bigger cash prize pools. By taking down a few freerolls, you can produce enough of a bankroll to bring to the cash tables or buy-in tournaments and continue assembling a munificent chip stack.
Some of the most well known poker pros to date have fostered a phenomenal bankroll without ever dropping a dime into a poker site. Take Annette Obrestad for example. She began playing online poker in the exact manner described above. She entered freerolls, won some cash, then hit the cash tables and progressively increased her stakes. Within a short period of time, she had amassed more than 5-digits and eventually went on to win the first annual World Series of Poker Europe in London at just 19 years old.
While it sounds like an easy task, winning a freeroll tournament isn’t a simple undertaking. The problem with freerolls is that they have an enormous field of players, and the opposition can be maniacal. Standard poker psychology doesn’t work in the early stages of a freeroll as it might in a tournament that everyone has paid money to enter. With no risk involved, players are prone to act more frivolously.
It is not until the middle and latter stages of a freeroll that most of the remaining participants will tighten up and play a more productive strategy; one that a skilled tell reader can predict and take advantage of.
If you want to reach the prize bubble in a freeroll, you have two choices at the start of the tournament. Either play as recklessly as the majority of the field and hope for a lucky strike, or fold repeatedly until the majority of the maniacs have been eliminated. With a little luck and a lot of persistence, a player can fabricate quite the bankroll without ever risking a dime of their own money.
The detailed strategies for building a bankroll with freerolls are intriguing, though uncertain if managing player expectations is easy.
I appreciate the focus on strategy, though skeptical if freerolls maintain long-term excitement.