Freeroll Tournaments

Freeroll tournaments are Multitable tournaments with no buy-in. They are, as the name indicates, absolutely free to enter and very popular. Especially beginners and more experienced poker players not wanting to risk a lot of money playing tournaments fill up the many Freerolls.

The prize pool in a poker tournament usually equal the total sum of the buy-ins paid by the players to enter the tournament. In a Freeroll this sum is zero, and since very few players find it interesting to play for absolutely nothing, the poker room will pay for a prize pool in such tournaments.
But running a poker room is a business, and since forking out free money is generally bad business the prizes in these Freerolls are rarely impressive.

This doesn't seem to affect the interest in playing Freerolls, and these tournaments always attract massive numbers of players. Massive meaning thousands and thousands.
If a Freeroll tournament has a maximum number of players set at 4.000 it's almost certain that 4.000 players will register to play.

Freeroll tournaments – simply because of the massive number of players – take a long time to play. A REALLY long time.
With just 2.000 players, a tournament will easily take seven or eight hours to complete, even taken into consideration that a lot of the players in Freerolls are – nicely put – moderately skilled players making more than the average number of mistakes and thus often busting out early.

Eight hours is a long time to play considering the prize pools in Freeroll tournaments are rarely much more than $50-$100 per 1.000 players registered. This adds up to a first prize in the range of $10-$50 – not much of a pay check after eight hours of work.
You will sometimes come across Freerolls with much bigger prize pools. These are mainly Freerolls used by the poker room for promotional purposes and can be very juicy. Prizes in these Freerolls can be thousands of dollars or even seats at big live events.

The great thing about Freerolls is however the possibility of playing huge tournaments for absolutely free. This should not be underestimated as a way to learn important tournament strategies. The only way to sharpen your skills at the table is by playing, and Freerolls offer an excellent and completely risk-free way to do just that.
You can't learn to be a good tournament player at the cash game tables. Tournament strategies, handling the blind structure and adapting a much more patient style of play can only be perfected by actually playing tournaments.


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