Full Tilt has ruined freerolls...

I went to register for the 5 PM HORSE only to find that 1) it's been registering for 20 minutes now (since 4:40 EST), and 2) max is 7500 (vs. 2400 or 2700). Same thing for razz and all the rest. Payout structure is also different. It used to be $100. Now it's $150, and now pays 45 spots with 37 to 45 paYING $.90. Sad, IMO. Hmmmmm....seems the USA freeroll is gone too.

Since I am officially broke on FTP looks like I am gonna have to start playing those freerolls. They picked a terrible time to raise the number of people able to participate in them.

So much for FTP having the best freerolls. From 2700 to 7500 with only a payout bump of $50 and 18 more spots paid. The 2700s took hours. 7500 that's just brutal. Seems like they went the way of pokerstars where they let almost 10k people join each one. UGH.

yep, i just went to look up the game that usually runs at 740pm..it now registers 1 hour before and has 7500 entrants...dear lord..not a fan

Wow. You all don't know what you missed a few years ago.

I built my initial BR by Freerolls. Actually UB used to have point mtt freerolls. I won 2 in a week time frame. I think there were maybe 225 players or so in each. Then I used some of the points to buyin into a $5 MTT and cashed for a whole $19. Then went to sng's (those make my eyes bleed now lol)and never looked back.

I guess those were the days and why you can hear stories of those who never deposited a penny of their own money. I can't imagine that more than a few have that chance now .

Winning one of the 2700 man freerolls on Full Tilt is how i've built my current bankroll. It took me over 6 hours to win that one. Now with 7500 in them. Probably add a couple to 3 hours for that. Kinda increases the importance of bankroll management cause whatever you do you don't want to go broke and have to fight through one of these.

Bad news glad I got $14 last night !

The Fulltilt $250 US Freeroll is still available ...I just found it at the same time as usual. Good luck with it. The 7500 freerolls are not much longer than the 2700 ones. I've made it down to #136 before after 4hrs...the blinds were killer however! A lot of donks...drop like flies in the first hr.

brilliant stuff mate keep it up

When ever I want to play a freeroll at Full Tilt in the past I would have to register on wired machine instead the wireless network because it was a gamble making the 200 micro second window before the tournament filled.

I see this morning there is a bigger, earlier game.

Just FYI for those with slower connections.

Now if Stars would modify that 80K satellite mid day.

Make a great day guys.

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Thanks, found the US freeroll. But tend to disagree of how long it takes. Yesterday, made it passed the 2nd break in HORSE, and went out in 3,651st place. True, it does take longer to cut the field in half with limit. I finished 1st in HORSE about a month ago, took maybe 5 & 1/2 - 6 hours. Also finished real deep in those Poker Stars donkfests, and it takes over 7 hours. I only played those out of pure enjoyment of hardish to find games, like Omaha HL, Badugi, 8-game, 2-7 Lowball. Thing is, once you get the field down to 2700, the competition gets a lot better, and they stop dropping like flies. At any rate, I've got a nice bankroll at Tilt. I play the HORSE, PLO and sometime Razz for fun, and maybe make a couple bucks. But 7500 is just brutal. No more.

BTW, at Poker Stars, the bubble itself takes 30 - 45 minutes. They start hand-for-hand maybe 3 out from the bubble, and you're waiting for 8 - 10 tables to finish each hand. I'd always sit out if I was in no danger.

what do you expect from imo the most cutthroat site out there.....i sent them a strongly worded email as to how i felt about the enorous amount of bad beats..they in turn have somehow managed to completely drain my br ..mainly by baiting me in with huge hands....then crushing me...we are not talking 25 bucks here either....

i am skeptical as hell about this site...and i play to suit... so if i seem donkey to you there ..its bc i play the software....

If the rate of blind increase is the same, do you guys really think it would add dramatically to the time of the tournament?

I know the game is still going to take the same 4 hours & 20 minutes to get to the 5000/10000 blinds, but will there be a much greater quantity of players still in or will they simply have busted out at a much faster rate?

THEY drained your Bankroll. YOU are not at all responsible.

What was your bankroll there?
What stakes were you playing?
You continued to lose when you dropped down stakes?
How long did you continue to play and lose?
Did you take a break and walk away?

Proper Bankroll Management can avoid these type posts. Good luck.

lol.......br management doesnt mean chit if you are always getting rivered....you can follow every br man. strategy you know...but if they keep paying off the donks...youll never keep it on the positive side...


i find it awfully suspect that i didnt go on such a huge swing until i told ftp off..

Well I have to admit that FullTilt has some terrible bad beats. But you have to keep in mind that after a few losses that you won't be thinking clearly in which case you will be playing hands without having pot odds, without being in position, and going all in to steal the pot on the turn and not noticing the straight possibility. So if you lose to one of the donks and experience even the slightest bit of anger I suggest you take a break.

thats is pretty crazy but then again i dont reli play the freerolls anymore but for the people that do i do feel for ya all cos that will take a lot of doing to cash in them now

That is usually when they flip the doomswitch.
Usually if you email and apologize for suggesting bad beats were in any way the sites fault, the will switch it back off.
Good luck.

I agree with the frustration. I seldom play the freerolls there anymore because it just is not worth the time and effort. Too many people, too little gain. Then, again, I have a sufficient BR to play the games that I like.

And, oddly enough, despite swings, despite the regular beatdowns, my BR remains relatively intact. BRM, combined with self-policing tilty times, has worked wonders. Also, trying very hard not to do anything stupid has seriously helped my game. When I do experience a serious downswing, my first thought is that it's me. I have yet to find a point where my game was leak-free and it was all about variance. There's always been something I am doing overall that is hurting my longterm results. Always.

BRM doesn't work if one's play is not good enough, although it can extend the time you can play on what you have. If one loses consistently, it's not the site. And even the big winners, the best players, lose a ton of hands, sessions, tourneys -- but they make up for the losses elsewhere, at other times. And this is, in part, because they can fix their game, improve, and not sweat the times there is a bad result to a good play.

And to think some think I'm a trouble maker (some would even call me an idiot) with my Bankroll Management posts.

I bow down to Pooffy

I don't know, this is actually something that sounds like a great idea. The 2700 player NLH tournaments filled up in about two seconds. Obviously the demand is there, so they've got to cater to the players. I was pretty stoked to see the increase in players. Long term, if you've got the skills at the game, you're going to be fine. Besides, games like Razz don't always hit the 2400 player limit anyway, so you're rarely going to hit gigantic fields there anyway.

Bring on the extra money, just means I win more when I take the whole thing down!

I agree .... nuff said

Thats because everyone knows BR management doesn't mean chit

Pooffy said Chit.. Iam telling ... Wait i said it too.. aww chit nevermind

+1

As a lowly dial-up user, it was impossible to register for the 19:40, and almost impossible for the 15:40.

I'm in the 15:40 now and it's already down to 4,000 from 7,500 after only 25 minutes. No doubt most / many of the "extra" 4,800 were playing "shove ATC"

Or has FT changed the sitout policy ? ...(auto eliminate if not present ? )

FT does not auto eliminate, afaik.
At least not in the private freerolls, the players slowly blind out.
I would say almost half of any field plays shove ATC.

Well, it looks like there are two flavors of the new 7500 freerolls, turbo & non-turbo. Unless you're a glutton for punishment, try sticking with the turbos. At least with the turbos, you'll know if you're going to make the money after 2 to 2.5 hours, with the other format it's 3.5 hours or so. And the worse one was the HORSE freeroll at about 4 hours; it appears that the blind structure may be different now, so maybe it's quicker. The DD turbo freeroll is worth a shot for the 1.5 hours needed to qualify for $1 or tourney.

The best ones IMO, if it weren't for the later (for East Coast) times, would be the Ferguson and the USA $250 freeroll.

I remember they used to be 900 players. Those were so much easier to cash. That was when Chris Furguson did his challenge too. I'd like to see how long it would take him now!

Ouch, 7500 players. Thats really brutal. I think it took at least 7-9 hours to finish it.

Lol FTP never had the best freerolls. Smaller sites offer the best freerolls.

So originally their structure was longshot-horrible (paying 1% of the 2700-strong field) and now their structure is... still longshot-horrible? I don't get it - surely we're only complaining about degrees of horrible here, you can hardly suggest that their old structure was good / consistently profitable anyway.

This is a stupid idea from full tilt. I really dont understand why they would do it. They already have the best reputation for freerolls and this is only going to ruin that.

If there were 2700 people in each freeroll im sure that everyone would be a lot happier. Gonna be a real struggle grinding in these things from now on

I'm not being funny but full tilts got a lot more going for it than 'the best reputation for freerolls' and i would think that their customer services dept places non depositing freerollers very very very low on the list of things they care about.

The site is giving all you tight arse frw's a chance to win FREE money how can you possibly complain about any aspect of the tournaments/structure when they are doing it off their own backs, and, considering the amount of money they make, really don't have to!

I don't understand why sites do so many freerolls anyways, i mean, besides from the odd handful that win a bit of cash, build it up, and end up being decent rake paying customers. When you think about it how much rake do freeroll players actually contribute to a site like fulltilt, on the grand scale of things, over their entire poker 'career', if you can call it that, not very much i would imagine, and with the extra strain that 20k+ people playing freerolls at a time puts on their servers i'm suprised they dont sack them off completely, or hold 1 a week or something, there's plenty of high rake paying regs that are whinging about the lagginess after the update, surely a solution to that would be to stop freerolls and take a bit of the strain off the system??

Anyways, back to the original point, all this fulltilt has ruined freerolls whine whine whine whinge whinge whinge, serves no purpose at all, they are a company at the end of the day and the only people they really care about are going to be the ones that pay them money and increase their profits.

I was half expecting somebody in this thread to write a reply in the vain of "i'm boycotting FT freerolls and never playing there again, who's with me", to be honest its the only reason i opened the thread and i'm very dissapointed so....

FT SUCK, I'M NEVER PLAYING FREEROLLS THERE AGAIN, WHO'S WITH ME??

I'm pretty sure Full Tilt (and indeed every other serious poker site) are a lot more interested in the rate at which they're converting freerollers to real money players than they are in their position on the "Best Freerolls LDO" list. So it makes sense for them to sacrifice the latter in favour of the former and making it harder to win freerolls makes it more likely people will just give up and deposit.

Keep in mind too that some people may actually see this as a good thing - the kind and benevolent Full Tilt managers have increased the field sizes so that more people get to play and they've increased the prize pools so that more people get a shot at getting their bankroll started. You and I may know that they've also made it a lot harder to reach the money, but not everyone will see it that way.

One last thought - how good are the freerolls at Poker Stars? Where do they come in on the "Best Freerollz" list? I rarely play there, let alone in freerolls, but I'm pretty sure they've got even bigger fields in their freerolls where it's even harder to make real money. And yet they're the biggest site on the internet - apparently having bad freeroll structures hasn't hurt them in that regard.

If you want a shorter freeroll, look out for the turbo freeroll to the daily dollar.

7500 entrants to 200 winners in under 2 hours. Then you can unregister from the daily dollar and spend your single tournament dollar on a real money SNG or tournament.