Freerolls can be very profitable for a poker player. Not because of the money there is to be won, as all but the most special freerolls only have small prize pools, but because of what you can learn while playing in them. A lot of poker players who play in real-money games have a tendency to forget about the freerolls, deriding them as not worth the time. However, freerolls are actually quite useful. You can use freerolls to improve your game, or you can enter a freeroll to learn how to play a poker variety you have not played before.
A large majority of players in freerolls are very loose, which makes freerolls a very good time to practice playing tight poker. If you can get into the habit of playing only premium hands in freerolls, not only will you in all likelihood get far into the freeroll, but it will help your play in ring games by training you to throw away hands that are easily dominated or only have a chance of becoming spectacular. It will also help you out in regular tournaments, but as tournaments leave more room for carefully calculated aggression, ring games will be the greater beneficiary of the tight play you practiced in the freerolls.
Freerolls can also help you learn how to play a poker variety in the same manner as throwing a person into a swimming pool will help them learn to swim. You can get an instant immersion into a game and learn directly from others who do know how to play the game. Just review the rules of the game before starting the freeroll and then pay attention to how the other players at your table play their hands and the strategies they employ. Of course, you should beware of whether the strategies the others use make sense and do indeed work, since you don’t want to be learning what not to do while thinking it is what you should do.
I employed this method of learning via total immersion when I played razz for the first time. At the time I sort of knew the rules of razz, but I did not really know how to play razz properly. Undaunted by my ignorance, I signed up for a razz freeroll anyways on Full Tilt Poker. As was to be expected, I was losing chips early on, but I ended up on a large run of amazing luck that helped me build a sizeable stack. I was learning as I played, though, so as the game went on I was losing less and less chips due to stupid moves. In the end I had nearly made the money, and I was amazed when I realized that I had placed better than Chris”Jesus” Ferguson, a professional poker player who knew what he was doing.
Playing in freerolls has helped me improve my game. I’ve gotten experience in playing tightly and now letting my chips slip away through loose calls and I’ve used freerolls to help me learn how to play varieties of poker I had little experience with. Freerolls can be helpful if you know how to approach them. And, of course, you can always play in freerolls just to mess around and have fun, just don’t let it affect the way you play when you’re serious.
