Overcoming variance in freerolls at full tilt

Hi guys. As I am still building my bankroll to be able to play in some larger cash game events I would like to have any suggetions has the $150 freerolls are littered with donks and fools. How you can overcome the variance there . I know these are "marathons" as I play in these regularly. I try to remain tag through out these but When you take a beat you are usually cruippled.

You will never overcome variance in FR IMO. You need to play according to your table, ie. if your table is super loose in the low blinds (high probability) then tighten up, and wait for decent hands and push back hard. If you notice tight players to your left, exploit them relentlessly when it is folded to you. When the blinds reach around 50/100 start widening your opening range in late position. Notice when players are going all in with crap and push back with decent hands. FR are full of "I dont care its a FR" type of player, and you have no defense against this. Try to get to mid blind play and attack aggressively. you need more luck as many players will call or raise you with crap. Its a freeroll and you cant do anything but try to notice player type and adjust as well as you can.

Good Luck.

I am doing most of that but it is frustrating after three hrs of play and your down to the final 199 ppl to get donkeyed by a guy who thinks its cute to shove with bottom pr and you have top top to have them Laugh at y6u in the chat box when they hit the second pr. I wanted to somehow reach thru this computer and strangle thef%$^&er somehow!

If that exact scenario is happening to you and there are no flush/straight draws on board then you are getting it in good and there is nothing different that you can do about it. You want that to happen. But like fletch said, you can't do anything to expect much better results. In freerolls, your Aces are going to be cracked by 64o, your straights are going to lose to runner runner flushes, your *insert hand beat hand situation* is going to happen, because no one gives a crap because they didn't invest a penny into it.

Theres nothing you can do about that. It will always happen in freerolls because people don't really care. I don't really know why because if your going to play that long and make it that far you might as well just play to win.

I really do like playing freerolls, but with all the bad players who don't care they can be really annoying.

The variance in freerolls (also known as "suckoutathons" ) isn´t that much higher than in normal micro mtt´s (with buy-in) . At the end the players are better than in the beginning. Just play straightforward abc poker, no fancy play and you´ll succceed...

I agree with this comment 100%. You just have to try and play though the donks and suckouts and wish for the best

Deposit ?

Although...

variance in typically inversely proportional to the edge you have over the competition. If you can't handle the variance of freerolls - where competition is obviously the softest - you can't handle the variance of regular MTTs. So the above advice is only valid if your goal is to play cash games or STTs.

The big HE freerolls are waste of time.The razz and horse are a bit easier I've won three and paced in quite a few but you need 6 hours plus and a heap of patience.
The Cardschat freerolls are classy, many skilled players.

Sit out the first 10-15 hands. That's usually when all the all-in'ers bust out.

get your self out of dem big fr's and concintrate on the smaller forum freerolls. You will do much better. stick with cardchsts and the fb games from tilt much better players and more rewarding for placing. I very seldom even play the weekly qualifier at tilt with ten thousand ppl in it. you are a good player invest your time wisely. Bigbigbucs

Why would you want to miss an opportunity to double up against the worst players?

When I started out playing on full tilt, I usually played in these big freerolls with 7,500 people. They dont really show much skill because most of the people just get lucky and thats how they make the money. They are very difficult to cash in if you don't get lucky a bunch of times. There is so much variance that they are a total waste of time in my opinion because getting the minimum sometimes like 90 cents is not worth it. Some of the private freerolls are much easier to cash in than these.

The first levels are very profitable - no fear ! The donks want to give their chips away, and you should take them, before another player gets those "free" chips. The variance (of tournaments in general) is unavoidable. Just play tons of tourneys, always your A game and be self confident - an you will succeed in the long run.

Honestly? Dont bother. I tried to build a bankroll through normal freerolls for months. Once FT started the 7500s I just quit trying, its just too tiring and unprofitable to sit for 4 or even 5 hours then bust out with nothing. Either deposit or sign up for the freeroll club here, you have enough posts.

Freeroll club is awesome imo, the play is much better and its difficult to cash the first few times you play, but after a few games you start to learn how to play them and you do better. 2 hours and you're in the money, 3 hours and you're on the final table, around 4 hours and you're done, 1st is 46+, which is about enough for a tentative BR at 2nl... although you should probably be starting with 100 dollars or even 200 if you want to be nitty about it.

I dont bother with cash either, its too hard for my stupid brain and lack of patience/hud. I stick with tournament (idiot's) poker, simpler, better imo.

Play in thousands of them and the variance should even out.

Unless what you actually want is to win a bunch of them rather than just have the variance even out... in which case just run good.

Because those are typically multiple players going all in so even if you have AA, your chances of winning drop like a rock. It's a long tournament plenty of opportunities to double and triple up. Can't win the tournament on the first hand.

While I would certainly not sitout and miss a good opportunity I certainly can see the point of avoiding a multi way all in where your AA and KKs are most vulnerable.

In a FR I don't think it matters much. No way I am folding these premium hands when there is a chance to take away 2 or 3 stacks.

FWIW the thing about your winning percentage going down with big pairs and multiple players preflop is MASSIVELY OVERRATED.

Yes, it's true, but there's still no reason to ever fold AA preflop. Especially in a freeroll where you haven't put any money on the line anyway.

Variance cannot be beat. It can only be outlasted with a proper bankroll.
Fortunately your bankroll for freerolls is unlimited.

Look... if you can get all-in with Ac\Ks vs 7h\2h pre-flop you're 63% to win, which is great. But lets say a freeroll has 500 players and 50 get paid. To make the money you need about 15k chips.
7h\2h shoves, you call, you win and double to 3k.
7h\2h shoves, you call, you win to double to 6k.
7h\2h shoves, you call... well if you win here you're winning 3/3 when you should only win 2/3. But you win.
7h\2h shoves, you call. Winning 4/4. How greedy are you to expect that? But you win and now have enough to cash.

The odds of you winning 4 times in a row with those hands? 16% That's worse than one out of 6 games.

And getting it in with A/K vs 7/2 is a dream scenario. If you expect to get it in good that many times in a row, you have issues.

Sounds like your saying you have won a few bucks but you wanna get to a comfort level by cashing in more freerolls. Stop wasting time with the $150 freerolls, put what you have won, to work, if you bust, go back to the freerolls. For every dollar made in one of those freerolls, you probably have to put in on average 20 hours.
I would suggest you probably have the skills to be making more than 5 cents an hour.

If his bankroll is really small, even at 2NL it will likely not last very long with only a couple buy-ins, especially if he doesn't have much experience with micro cash games(which I am just assuming since you're not depositing)

That would seem to be the real issue. If you get your money in good, you can't be attached to the outcome. After that, your challenge is to not let a bad result put you on tilt. That's Poker.

quit playing those freerolls. Ive only cashed twice out of at least 100 times. play the daily dollar, ferguson, and private freerolls

I agree.. The daily double or the BLT are alot better....Freerolls just make me wanna hurt people around me since I cant hurt the people who donk on me...

2 nights ago i went out 130 something from Dayly Dollar with 8.5 dollars after 5 hours of play. I played last mounth BLT and cashed 6 dollars. I registered for the first time depositor ticket after putting 10 dollars on FT, forgot to play but found 4 dollars in my cashier. I went out in the money without playing after 17k ppl registerd.

You can cash something playing correct poker in this kind of tournaments.
But if someone has 20-30 dollars i would advise to play the 45 ppl 1+0.1 dollars sngs and play it by the book, super tight, without trying to bluff untill the money, because they will cash more.

But with 3-4 dollars ... i think 0.25+0.05 Dayly dollar 9 ppl sng sats are the way to go. Qualify , deregister and you have 95 cents. But you have to play it right , even to win at this SNgs you need to read the Moshman's book.

For Pokerstars with 2-3 dollars i would advise the 2 cents sngs. They are better than freerolls.

I disagree. I love Moshman's book, but it will not help you all that much with the extremely low level thinking of the players you will be playing with in these SnG's. The concepts of the book are way beyond them. Just play ABC poker and you're going to be good. IMO the best place to start getting aggressive in any SnG under $5 is when there are 4 people left and 3 get paid because down here, everyone is so concerned with at least a min-cash that they tighten up way too much.

I played ABC poker and got my butt kicked. Simply what goes in the tournaments does not go there at those small buy-in tournaments. There are a lot of situations specially when there are 4 ppls left and the blinds are high where you should think about the book. The concepts of survive , high blind play , high blind limpers are probabely the most important things you should consider when playing with beginners and that will give you a serious edge over them. Also shortstack play at SNgs is most common at this tourney for a TAG player. Avoiding to get outblinded is also an important part in SNG.
Even here the book is giving you an important edge. If i play ABC poker at absolute beginner lvl i only can play Aces or kings because of the bunch of callers. Untill readding the book i alyaws thought that i never get good cards to play TAG so that's why i suck at SNGs. After reading it comed the revelation

Pushing and praying is the basic guide to these games.... I came 9th once... out of thousands. It was shear luck almost.

With freerolls I like to adopt a different mentality, since there is nothing at stake other than your own time. If time is not of a concern, then playing ABC poker and only getting it in only when way ahead will probably lead to more cashes/profitability on a per-tournament basis. But the thing to remember is that there is another new freeroll every 2 hours and there is no initial stake involved -- so busting out early isn't exactly a huge problem and is actually somewhat preferable to busting out after 3-4 hours time invested.

If I'm at a table and there are 3+ all-ins on the first hand before the action comes to me with JJ+, I'm putting my stack out there because there's an OK chance I'm still ahead of or at least in good contention against the donkey range of the other hands. I'll take a 30%-40% chance of quadrupling up or better, with minimal time invested in the tourney, and no money invested. Sure, I'll bust out 60-70% of the time, but if that happens I don't really care because there's another tourney coming in two hours.

Starting the tourney with a huge stack helps a lot, because it offers some protection down the line -- the 4-out gutshot straight caller that hits his miracle against your flopped set will only hurt your chipstack instead of eliminating you. Then you have a read on your opponent and can retake his chips when the time is right.

^^^ This tbh.

Freerolls are cruel in many many ways. One of them being that if you play tight and sit out the first rounds, what happens is that that once the 1/3 of most lunatic players have shoved themselves out, half of the remaining players now have twice as many chips as you have.

Nothing happens. You are closer to the money. Do not think that those that have huge stacks after the first half hour will win it.

By playing tight you are basically entering a tournament with half as many chips as the other players. As the poster above said, you might as well get down and dirty with an early allin to get in with it, or else just start another freeroll.

Or that

But also with that dirty all in it is not guaranteed to get ITM.

If you play in free rolls you are going to get the donks etc no matter what. I play a lot of them and just have to over come them which is not that easy either.

I try and play good hands but every so often I get knocked out by a rag pair or something to that effect. Ive gone all in with large pocket pairs and someone calls me with 6, 3 off and hits two pairs or a straight.

Stuff happens but more so in free rolls. I just play a tight game to start and then hope for the best.

You will never get away from them in free rolls at the start of the game.