Poker Freeroll Strategy and Tips

Poker freerolls are tournaments that don’t cost a penny to enter whilst still providing a small prize pool. On the other hand you are often competing against thousands of other players for a share of just a few dollars. There are still benefits to playing in freerolls:-

1) Freerolls allow you to establish a starting bankroll and to see if you like playing real money poker without risking your own money.
2) Freerolls provide an opportunity to gain experience of playing poker online. Although the standard of play is very low in freerolls you will get to practice playing final tables which is where the big money lies in the real money tournaments. The difference between 10th and 1st is often extreme and so getting used to the pressure of a final table could prove invaluable.

3) For enjoyment! Freerolls are still fun and with the objective of some financial gain is certainly better than play money poker.

As there is no buy-in for a freeroll this directly effects the type of player that enters them and such the optimum strategy to do well in freerolls.

Your Opponents

The players that play freerolls usually fall into one of two categories:-

1) The completely beginner who is just learning the game.
2) The player who can’t be bothered to play in the tournament and just wants to splash their chips around.

This has the following consequences:-

1) Nobody respects your bets and raises and everyone will call you down with bottom pair.
2) It’s near impossible to hand read or find out what your opponents are thinking because their play is so erratic they don’t even know what they are thinking.
3) Any advanced plays are too advanced to work.

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How to Win Freerolls

If you want to win freerolls you have to use a strategy best suited to beating this opposition. This will mean you have to play solid ABC poker. This means:-

• Play good quality starting hands.
• Make your opening raises big and your bets larger than normal to take advantage of your preflop equity edge.
• Bet when you have a good hand to get value and don’t try to bluff.

The Early Stage?

In the early stage of freerolls there will be the largest number of crazy players. You will see a number of players going all in every single hand. If you open the tournament lobby you will notice the number of remaining player dropping dramatically literally a couple of hundred players will be busting out every minute.

To survive this early stage you don’t need to employ and tricky plays just wait for your premium hands and play them really fast. Raise at least 5 times the big bling as an opening raise and if someone has raised before you, you can even push all in and be called close to 100% of the time as people hate folding if they have even invest 1% of their stack.

After the flop the question you have to ask yourself is, do you have anything? If you don’t then you will just have to check and fold. Continuation bets in freerolls are just burning money as your opponent will call them with air.

If you do hold a draw such as a flush or straight draw then you can put in a continuation bet, if you have a made hand such as top pair then be ready to never fold. Put in a pot size continuation bet and try and get your money all in as soon as possible.

The Late Stage?

The late stage of a tournament usually means that you only have about 10-15 big blinds left in chips. This means there isn’t any room for post flop play. If you have raise pre-flop and put in a bet on the flop you will usually be pot committed with your hands so we should employ a push or fold strategy. This means we are never calling but making a simple decision, if we like our starting hand we are all in, if we don’t we are folding.

Push all in, in any position if you're holding AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, AJ+ and KQ. Once you are in later position you can start going all in with a wider range of hands. This is for the obvious reason that there are less players left to act and so a smaller chance they have a good enough hand to call. So for example if you’re in the small blind and everyone has folded around to you, you can go in with a massive range of hands, at the very least the top 50% of hands will give you an edge over the hands the big blind might hold. This should be obvious as a random hand is better than 50% of hands and worse than the other 50% so if we go all in with the top 50% of hands our hand will be better than the big blinds range.

The Final Table?

The strategy you should employ on the final table is very similar to that described for the late stage of the tournament. Depending on our stack size we should probably be employing a push or fold strategy.

We should usually respect a players raise if it is from early position, in all likelihood in this scenario they hold a strong hand.

If there is an early position raise, go all-in with AA, KK, QQ, JJ and AK.
If there is a middle position raise, go all-in with a pair of tens, nines or AQ.
If nobody has open raised, then go all-in with 99+ as well as AJ+ and KQ.
If you're in late position and nobody has raised before you then you can start to open you range every wider any pair and two broadway cards should be profitable.

At this stage of the tournament you should be going for the win as the prize pool is usually massively weighted towards first place and all other places only get a small fraction. So good luck in your next freeroll and we hope to see you on the real money tables shortly!

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