I've tried most of the
US friendly poker sites, and I am a bit of a freeroll whore. More on the FT freerolls late in this post.
Playchips on FT are good for a couple of things. First they are a way to learn your way around the software. Second they can give you a basic understanding of bankroll management. But you have to take them fairly seriously. If you are a good player you can advance pretty quickly to the 10,000 chip games and above. Play at the 10,000 and 100,000 level is pretty good, some say comparable to mico-limits.
Once you get above 1 million in chips you can sell them or enter into the 500,000 playchip about 8:00pm ET which has cash prizes.
As for the $100.00 freerolls on FT, there are 6 for NLHE (all times ET); 7:40pm, 11:40pm, 2:40am, 5:40am, 9:40am, and 3:40pm. There is a Razz, Omaha, and occasional HORSE usually between the 3:40pm and 11:40pm times. In addition Ft has been running for the past 3 weeks a $1,000.00 superturbo on Friday evenings. The NLHE events have a max field of 2,700 and the others except the superturo field of 5,000 are 2,400.
To make a sign up for the more popular time NLHE freerolls you have to already have the tourney lobby open and be-ready 40 minutes before the events starts. If you are on a loptop you want to forgo trying to click the right boxes and click on register then spacebar enter. During the week the 2:40am if open for around 5 minutes and the 5:40 sometimes goes off unfilled.
I had never played NLHE before March of this year and have accumulated a bankroll of over $22.00 from freerolls alone.
The forum private freerolls are the best thing going in freeroll land! Usually the field is smaller. Today's CC FT freeroll only had 480 entrants, in addition most payout the top 10% of entrants. The nice thing about this is you can play a sound tourney strategy and even if you suffer a couple of bad beats late you still get a little something for your time.
Besides CC there are a couple of good forums that hold private freerolls. I will not break T&C by listing them here, but feel free to private message me if you are interested.
Freerolls IMO are the best way to learn the game well and build a bankroll with no risk.