The biggest difference between free play or free games is you cannot win money. You’re given free chips and you can play any free game you can afford to buy into. But there are no real money prizes. You’ll only win more free chips. But with freerolls you can win real money prizes – like cash or tournament entries. Freerolls are poker tournaments which are free to participate in but do have a real money prize pool. They provide an opportunity for beginning online poker players to build a bankroll without ever having to make a real money deposit.
After you’ve played a few freerolls, chances are you’ll have cashed or are on the brink of your first one. Which means you’ll want to know this:
What the heck do you do with the money you’ve won?
Most players will want to parlay this into a bankroll. To move up in stakes and start playing games that aware real money prizes.
And that’s a great idea. But, only if you’re ready.
For one thing, you should only make the jump if you’re comfortable with your poker skills. It won’t be a huge transition, moving from freerolls to real money games. But it’ll help you a ton if you have the basic MTT fundamentals and strategy down.
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Then there’s your bankroll.
We don’t recommend switching to real money games with a tiny bankroll. It’s great that you’ve won $10 or $20, but you’ll struggle to find traction if that’s all you take with you to the micro stakes. A bad bout of variance will send you to the showers.
Instead, we recommend having a minimum of $100 before making the switch to real money games. This will give you 20 buy-ins for $0.2/$0.05 or $0.05/$0.10 cash games, or about 30-50 buy-ins for the $1-$3 SNGs.
We recommend playing SNGs because they’re great for learning MTT fundamentals. They’re much easier on your bankroll, too.
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But that’s only one-half of the battle. You also need to learn how to manage your bankroll, unless you want to go back to playing freerolls. You can learn about bankroll management here.
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And there you have it. That’s how you can build your poker bankroll and launch your career playing freeroll tournaments.