Forget Freerolls

The quicker you can learn to play a decent game of poker the better. Cut your teeth on freerolls by all means as a learnibg process, but leave them behind once you progress.
Start playing cash games, and at the highest stakes you can afford. This should remove the poorer skill players amd the all in merchants with no hand. You'll be playing in a different class of players who know and understand the game and hopefully will prove to be more profitable for you

Forget freerolls

I actually agree 100%. I am playing a lot of free rolls at the moment only because of the time of year. It helps pass the time. But yes money games always tend to make the craziness go away.

its true

its better cash games

rigor mortis said:

The quicker you can learn to play a decent game of poker the better. Cut your teeth on Freerolls by all means as a learnibg process, but leave them behind once you progress.
Start playing cash games, and at the highest stakes you can afford. This should remove the poorer skill players amd the all in merchants with no hand. You'll be playing in a different class of players who know and understand the game and hopefully will prove to be more profitable for you

Click to expand...

Disagree here big time $2000-$10000+ a year can be made from freerolls and the buy in games you win after cashing in freerolls.
Look at this freeroll for example on partypoker this Saturday forgot about it you must be joking my alarm is set.
I am no stranger to putting in volume on much higher stakes and serious games just think you should play both and not miss any value at all example below,
All the freeroll is just another screen open when have 5 or 6 screens open anyway.
While you should grind higher stakes when you can frankly am alarmed by overlooking anything that is +EV in your poker schedule.:hahaha:
Happy new year to you and yours rigor mortis.

I do agree freerolls are not the end goal. They require a certain crazy playing style which relies on a lot of luck. I'm generally short on luck.

But high stakes cash games are not the next step for most of us either. Yes, you're going to encounter a much higher calibre of play, but are you ready for that? Even if you're a strong player, when everyone is equally skilled the margins are very slim. High risk - low margins. I guess it depends on how much you're willing, and more importantly able to risk.

Freerolls has it's place in the poker world, but cash games
are more apealing to the seasoned player.

I think freerolls are a good way to build a starting bankroll. And then what to play - everyone chooses for himself.

It your own thoughts. I personally found 200 and have learned a lot.

rigor mortis said:

The quicker you can learn to play a decent game of poker the better. Cut your teeth on Freerolls by all means as a learnibg process, but leave them behind once you progress.
Start playing cash games, and at the highest stakes you can afford. This should remove the poorer skill players amd the all in merchants with no hand. You'll be playing in a different class of players who know and understand the game and hopefully will prove to be more profitable for you

Click to expand...

If you believe that removing "poorer skill players and the all in merchants with no hand" is beneficial to your game, and also "play the highest stakes you can afford", please let me know how that turns out for you (you may call collect once you lose everything).

I disagree I have started all my bankrolls on different poker sites all by freerolls. Then I started playing buy in tournaments later and won more. In the process you learn how to play for free and win money. But it is true playing in buy in tournaments players do play better but lower buy in ones still have players play some bad hands. It is poker gambling it is I look at it that way.

When I switched to cash games, I thought that players take the game more seriously than in freerolls. Not really. You sit for hours without losing or winning. Crazy players come in, put all the streets in a row and get nuts on the river. You lose the amount for the whole day gained.

I don't always know people who have gone up and down again

rigor mortis said:

The quicker you can learn to play a decent game of poker the better. Cut your teeth on Freerolls by all means as a learnibg process, but leave them behind once you progress.
Start playing cash games, and at the highest stakes you can afford. This should remove the poorer skill players amd the all in merchants with no hand. You'll be playing in a different class of players who know and understand the game and hopefully will prove to be more profitable for you

Click to expand...

Naturally, when the bank has grown it will no longer want to spend time on a freeroll. But sometimes you can play to relax, break in new tactics.

Nothing wrong with Freerolls

I don't think there is anything wrong with playing freerolls even as you progress in your skill level. They are a good way to pass time and in some ways it helps you improve other skills need for poker. You just have to adjust your style of play, never think you can play a freeroll the same way you can play a buy-in game (depending on the buy-in that is).

I like freerolls because of bankroll startups. The problem is the crazy amount of loose players that call anything.

I mostly agree, I find freerolls to largely be a very punty experience outside of the FRC. I admit that I even punt myself in the small ACR freerolls since the prizes really aren't worth much of my time.

I'm nothing without freerolls.If it wasn't for freerolls I wouldn't play on line poker.I am an on line poker player,specialy freerolls.

rigor mortis said:

The quicker you can learn to play a decent game of poker the better. Cut your teeth on Freerolls by all means as a learnibg process, but leave them behind once you progress.
Start playing cash games, and at the highest stakes you can afford. This should remove the poorer skill players amd the all in merchants with no hand. You'll be playing in a different class of players who know and understand the game and hopefully will prove to be more profitable for you

Click to expand...

There are parts of your post that I agree with, but a lot of it I disagree with. I agree that the quicker you learn to play a decent game of poker the better! However, jumping to stakes you can't afford and not understanding the high level of thought by the players you're playing with will do nothing but put you in the poor house. You need to gradually improve and prove you can beat the current stakes you're playing and yes, that should start with free-rolls.

I see you say use free-rolls as a leaning process, so you do understand they are a learning tool, but you then say they should jump to the highest level they can afford once they have "learned what they need to progress", which is very much not true. The game of poker is constantly evolving and NO ONE will ever have it learned, so you need to make the natural progression from bottom to top. Once you can beat free-rolls then you try to beat micro stakes, then mid stakes, then high stakes. You learn throughout this whole process.

Now to the most baffling part of your post. Why....... why oh why would you want to remove bad players, and replace them with good players............... WHYYYYYYY we profit off bad players, that is the easiest form of poker. Why would you think that playing better players would be more profitable for anyone?

hugh blair said:

Disagree here big time $2000-$10000+ a year can be made from freerolls and the buy in games you win after cashing in freerolls.
Look at this freeroll for example on partypoker this Saturday forgot about it you must be joking my alarm is set.
I am no stranger to putting in volume on much higher stakes and serious games just think you should play both and not miss any value at all example below,
All the freeroll is just another screen open when have 5 or 6 screens open anyway.
While you should grind higher stakes when you can frankly am alarmed by overlooking anything that is +EV in your poker schedule.:hahaha:
Happy new year to you and yours rigor mortis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suY06PVK_bI

View attachment 261760

View attachment 261761

Click to expand...

Well put Hugh I agree completely with your post! Well said.

MattRyder said:

I do agree freerolls are not the end goal. They require a certain crazy playing style which relies on a lot of luck. I'm generally short on luck.

But high stakes cash games are not the next step for most of us either. Yes, you're going to encounter a much higher calibre of play, but are you ready for that? Even if you're a strong player, when everyone is equally skilled the margins are very slim. High risk - low margins. I guess it depends on how much you're willing, and more importantly able to risk.

Click to expand...

I agree. Well put.

zinzir said:

If you believe that removing "poorer skill players and the all in merchants with no hand" is beneficial to your game, and also "play the highest stakes you can afford", please let me know how that turns out for you (you may call collect once you lose everything).

Click to expand...

Yea, not going to go well. Will be applying for personal loans, and selling their house in the future.

The (small amount) money I have won in free rolls I use to play in the money games. What I am not big on is when buy-in can be up to 90 min. after the game has started.

Freerolls for life. Easy game.

Poker is poker man. It does not matter if it is freeroll or play money or $500 buy in. It is the same game. If you love the game you play anything. If you play a good game you can be successful at any buy in level.

Removing the lesser players from a game will never make it easier to profit in. This is what bad players tell themselves to justify why they can't beat a game.

A fair point to make would have been that if you are playing purely for the $$$ the freerolls and micro buyins does not offer the kind of return on investment (Both time and money) that the higher levels does.

hi there
i agree with you....but
dont forget that there are starters with low stakes and fishes
you should pay attention to those
rgds

I'm a fan of freerolls personally, especially when they offer a nice prize. However, I've been learning and am still learning the game so it makes sense for me.

Will use today as an example I played 3 games on partypoker including 1 buy and 1 on pokerstars at the same time why should I forget about the 2 freerolls when its a win win?
I do play tournaments,sit and gos,spin and gos plenty of cashgames even the odd bit of Omaha to keep it interesting.
Funny thing here is in this instance I earned the same amount nearly from the smaller freeroll cash than I did sweating a $109 that I nearly busted in one or 2 all in hands before the money.

I agree with the original poster. With the exception of the Cards Chat freerolls here in the USA, most of them suck because they only give away $10-$15 in a field of hundreds of players. That's ridiculous. ACR did a freeroll series recently that was for big $$$, but the structure was so terrible that you were forced to gamble while eliminating the skill component of the game. I didn't like it at all.