Almost all new poker players to Star Poker end up coming online and searching the internet for freeroll tournaments. A freeroll tournament is a tournament that doesn’t cost you any money to play and you have the chance of winning money. The prize pool is paid by the poker room that is offering the freeroll tournament and they do these tournaments to attract new players into there poker room. The biggest downfall of freeroll tournaments is that it’s difficult to win much money in them. Usually only the top 10 or so positions are paid in these tournaments and these tournaments generally attract thousands of new players. The prize pools are often small as well and for first place you might only win $50 and to win first place in a 2000 player tournament for example would take 4-6 hours roughly.
As you can see freepoker tournaments aren’t really ideal for making money. What they are good for though is they help new players gain experience in playing poker. Every poker player started out not knowing anything at one point and we all spent the time to train and become better players. As a new player you don’t necessarily want to invest any of your own money playing so the only other way to play with the chance to win some money is through poker freerolls.
Once you play in several Full Til Poker freerolls if you see that you’ve been doing well and finishing within the top 500 or so players then it might be time to move up the ladder. There is no point spending hours’ playing freeroll tournaments to win $10-$20 when you could be spending the time playing real money tournaments. Most poker rooms have tournaments that start as low as $1 so its not like you need to invest a lot of money to win some money.
If you played a $1 tournament with only 9 players you can win $5 for coming in first place and this type of single poker.com table tournament might take 30 minutes to play. You also win $3 for second place and $2 for third place if these small tournaments. So if you can consistently finish in the top three then you’ll easily be able to increase your bankroll at a much quicker pace then playing freeroll tournaments.
Once you start winning money at poker and your bankroll becomes bigger you can start playing in larger buy-in tournaments. $5 tournaments pay about $25 for first place which is not bad for maybe 30-60 minutes of poker. Freeroll tournaments are ideal to learn the game of poker and get a feel for how tournaments are played, but after a few tournaments I suggest depositing $25 and try playing in some small tournaments. I mean $25 isn’t much and you’ll have more fun and more potential for winning money. Freeroll tournaments also take a long time whereas single table tournaments might take an hour maximum to complete so you don’t need to play for so long in one session.