Moving on from freerolls: Double or Nothing

As I have gone through the 3,000 post barrier recently, I thought I'd try my hand at a strategy article!

People arrive at online poker from a range of directions and sources, and one of the most common routes is chasing freerolls, also known amongst the poker community as being a Freeroll Whore, or FRW for short. I arrived at the CardsChat forum initially as a FRW, attracted to their regular freerolls and the concept that I could make some free money with no initial investment. Needless to say that is not quite as straightforward in reality as it initially sounds, and as I have learnt more about poker I have become increasingly frustrated by the type of poor play that I frequently encounter in poker freerolls, especially during the initial stages of non-CC freerolls, when a lot of players seem to go all-in with any two cards.

Also depositing at a CC link (http://www.cardschat.com/announcement.php?f=48), but in order to release these bonuses it is generally necessary to play a lot of hands, and to pay the site a lot of rake in the process. The first point to make is that those bonuses are not much use to you if you consistently lose money playing poker, as you are likely to spend more money building up the required number of Player Points than you will eventually release as a bonus. However, assuming that you can play break-even poker or (ideally) winning poker, what is the best way to release your bonus? I have spent some time looking at the low buy-in tournaments at PokerStars and have found a type of tournament which I can multi-table successfully, which increases my FPPs quite rapidly without exposing me to the large variance which MTTs are subject to. They are the $1 Double or Nothing sit and go tournaments.

The concept is quite simple. Ten people sit at a table, the last five people remaining at the table win $2 and the other five go away with nothing. This is quite different to most tournaments where the higher the finishing position, the more money you win, so they demand a different type style of play in order to optimise your opportunities of breaking even or actually making a profit.

These tend to go through two distinct phases, the first three or four people can disappear quite quickly, but to take out the other two people can take up to an hour more! As you don’t gain any major advantage by being the chipleader, it is only really worthwile playing premium hands in the initial stages, and once you have doubled or tripled your stack you can sit tight. However, once you enter the prolonged bubble period it is important to only focus on taking out the short stacks, and don’t bother becoming involved in battles with people that have a bigger stack than you. If in doubt – fold! Having said that, the bubble is also a great period for stealing blinds if you have a reasonable stack, because as soon as anybody raises (except short stacks) people tend to fold. One thing I have noticed is that the amount of time that they take to play varies enormously. Sometimes I will open two of these tournaments at more or less the same time, one of them might finish within twenty minutes and the other one might drag on for over an hour. The key is to look for the safest possible opportunities to take out short stacks, and by playing these tournaments cleverly you can help them to finish as quickly as possible.

If you are down to six players and the short stack goes all in, it is in everybody else’s interests to have as many people in that hand as possible, because that reduces the statistical chances of the short stack winning the hand. So don’t try to force people out of the hand by betting aggressively, and the ideal option is for everybody to call and then check all the way to the river. As soon as the sixth person is eliminated you all win anyway, so at that point in time it doesn’t really matter which one of you takes them out. PokerStars don’t want you telling people things like that in chat, so in these tournaments they have now stopped chat once there are only seven players left.

They do two types of Double or Nothing at PokerStars. The $1 + $0.15 ones have a slower blind structure, the $1 + $0.10 ones are turbo tournaments. Personally I prefer the turbo ones as they tend to be quicker. These tournaments are quite boring but they are ideal for multi-tabling, and learning to multi-table with more and more tables is a necessary skill to develop if you are intending to make money out of online poker anyway.

Good luck!

How many FPPs do you get for playing in a $1 double-or-nothing tournament at PokerStars?

It's taking me forever to accumulate points at .02/.05 NL 6-max, even playing 14 tables at once. I don't see how I can make Silver Star until I move to .05/.10 NL.

Congrats on 1k posts and good luck with your quest!

Nice post NWF. Congrats on the milestone.

Nice post NWF

Having played a lot of these recently i cant see anything you have missed out

Although i haven't tried the turbo games i must say that the 'normal' timed games can get very boring at times with people constantly timing out, it seems to happen a lot for some reason on these games.

They are a good way of building your BR (1 FPP per $1 game) and i find it best to play at least two at a time just to kill the waiting between hands if you have a slow table

Congrats on 3k
I tried playing some of these DoN's and had a pretty similar experience. I just couldn't handle it after a few days, it hardly feels like poker when you are always playing the bubble :P

The rake on pokerstars has to be .40 to earn a FPP. Which means the pot has to be almost $8.00. Which means even at 10nl you wont earn that many points. 25nl is where you start earning points on a regular bases.

very nice 1K post NWF.

im making a deposit on pokerstars next week so i'll have to give these a shot

Keep in mind you have to cash in these tournaments more than 50% of the time to make playing in them profitable. You're only making 0.90$ per cash, and you're losing 1.10 (or 1.15) per loss. meaning if you play 10 games, you'll need to win 56 out of every 100 to see an profit in the turbo game, and you'll have to win 59 out of 100 to see a profit in the non-turbo games.

Keeping this in mind, i think its pretty safe to say that the 1+.20 SNG that pay first second and third places are a better investment for the money.

Good article though, i just think that the money made on free rolls can be better spent in other tournaments.

I was trying to clear my bonus so didn't actually need to make a profit, and I was able to multitable the DONs - at one point I had 15 of them running simultaneously! If I had 15 of the $1.20 tournaments running I would probably not have done so well, DONs don't need much concentration as long as you use a HUD. Also I received 1 FPP for each tournament played, regardless of how much rake I paid. I prefer to pay 10c rather than 20c in rake.Thanks - but it's quite a while since I reached 1k!

ooooooo my bad sir.

very very nice 3K + post lol

I can't wait to be done with freerolls. Need to make like 1 more dollar. LOL. I've decided my game isn't improving at all, the only thing growing is my frustration level. I think I'll use every dollar beyond the initial 10 that I've made, to take a shot at the $1+ .25 sit and go's.

Hey NWF, I have played quite alot of the DoN games on ipoker.

They had a promo going where you had to try finish top of the leaderboard.

I found it quite hard to profit out of them but mostly broke even and earned alot of points as i was 4 tablin for about 5 hours a day.

I wouldn't like to see alot of callers if a short stack is all in however, as they are right back in the game if they win.

I prefer to get a healthy stack and put pressure on the other players from good positions to steal blinds.

ah, ok. Makes sense now.

So if these tournaments take about an hour, you earn 1 FPP each, and you can play up to 24 at a time, reaching Silver Star might actually be possible with only playing 2 - 3 hours per day. Cool. I might give that a try. Probably couldn't make any money, but like you said, I could clear bonuses faster and earn FPPs at a better clip with less money at risk at a time (14 tables x $5 at 5nl vs. say 15 tables x $1).

Are there usually lots of these going and starting up at all times of day?

Congrats on passing the 3K post mark -- impressive! Very helpful post, too. Thanks.

Sometimes there are about 15 available, sometimes only 3 or 4, but either way they always fill up quickly.

the best advice i can give you on double or nothings is....play only the elite hands AA QQ KK AK and AQ....and play them very aggressively...if you are not getting these hands at all, its obvious you are gonna have to steal a few blinds in position, especially in the turbo format...another piece of advice...if you really want to make a little money playing this game, make a deposit...far too much of a luck factor in the micro levels...it is my opinion you need to play 10 dollar buyin MTTs and SnGs to eliminate the "its only a dollar" factor...meaning people will call and chase anything when its only a dollar buyin....as for ring tables you can find decent play at the .10 .20 cent blind level but your best bet is .25 .50 cent blinds...stick a jar by your bed and throw some spare change in it each day...at the end of the month you will have plenty in there to make a deposit...wash rinse repeat...

gl to you
wooter

Congrats on the 3k posts!
I like the DON tournaments. I have never played them at PokerStars but do play regularly at PlayersOnly. Same concept, buy-in 2.20, 5 players win $4.00. They have these in $5.50 buy-ins, $11 , $25, and even $100. I have had great success playing the $2.20 buy-in,about 80%. I will join a MTT and then while I wait for it to begin, I get into a double up game, and hopefully win that to pay for the buy in of the MTT.
I will definately check out the DONs at PokerStars now.

I think sit and gos may be the way to go for me. I've found the 1-5K guaranteed tournaments with the small buy ins of roughly 1-2 dollars to be a complete waste of time and money. It's fun to play in something with the potential to win quite a bit of money with a very low input, but as a means to make money I find this to be pretty terrible. At such low stakes it just takes one donk to knock you out with nothing to show for it. With thousands of players this is fairly probable. Thoughts?

I still don't understand how people do this AND maintain a "good" level of play. =O

I just need more experience, clearly.

I've played the don's at pokerstars I do enjoy playing them I win more then I lose just takes a little patiences just seems easy to cash in them for me I'm trying to work my way up to the 10.00 ones

or a HUD...

I dunno....as a beginner I'm wary of getting something that "helps" me make decisions before I'm fully aware of the why's and how's behind those decisions. =/

Yes, I agree with you 100% on that one. Don't forget that I played freerolls for about a year before moving on. The point that I'm trying to make is that without me having a HUD I wouldn't have been able to release my bonus this way, because I would have lost too much money doing so.

Also check out post 19 in this thread, by WurlyQ, it contains a lot of good advice:

http://www.cardschat.com/f11/stars-d...9/#post1226921

Nice post OP, and congrats on 3K

This is definitely the correct mindset to have as a poker player at all level of play (not just as a beginner) so keep it up!

The way multi-tabling works is that after you understand a concept and see it in the works over and over and over, it becomes ingrained in the subconscious mind meaning that you don't have to think about it every time it comes up. That means that you can make decisions faster because you've already gone through the reasoning many times and can accept it as true.

This is even more true in double or nothings where "fold" is the clearly correct option about 85% of the time, "push" is the clearly correct option about 10% of the time, and only about 5% of the remaining options are remotely close enough to warrant thinking about.