Is there any skill involved in...

[admo415]

Freerolls? I got 2nd out of 366 people in a $500 Daily Freeroll offered by Empire. Or is play in this generally much much worse that if they buy-in was 5+1?

Thanks

[schwza]

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I got 2nd out of 366 people in a $500 Daily Freeroll offered by Empire

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congrats.

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Or is play in this generally much much worse that if they buy-in was 5+1?


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i haven't played a freeroll in a long time, but i'm 100% sure that it is. but...

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Is there any skill involved in...

Freerolls?


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yes.

[admo415]

Cool, maybe I will give a small MTT a try...what sucked though was that it took 6 hours to finish..blah

Thanks for the response

[schwza]

no problem.

if you can avoid it, the 5+1 is a rip-off. you can play 5+.50 at ultimate bet or poker stars, or you could spring for a 10+1 at empire.

[Chris Daddy Cool]

of course there's skill involved. its still poker afterall.

[IHateKeithSmart]

I will sometimes play the PP party points freerolls and the UB freerolls.

It seems that about 1/2 the field is there to play (doesn't mean they are good at it) and the other 1/2 is there to throw all their chips around/away. Once you get down to about 1/4 of the field, there will be a mix of some decent players and wild players who've gotten lucky thus far.

You will see some ridiculous calls, which can make it fairly easy to build your stack if you have some hands early. As others say, though, skill is still involved, but these bananas calls are what I think separate these from the 5-10 $ buyin MTTs I've played.

[otctrader]

They're a good way to hack out some tourney skills, although the play is maniacal for the first hour and to some extent into the second.

Funny thing I've found is a $20,000 freeroll with a $20 overlay plays completely different from a Stars $2+0; as soon as the players pony up even a token amount they begin to notice the fold button exists.

[Hauser_III]

I think there's skill involved, just not to the same degree as real dollar tourneys. I've played about 10 freerolls on PartyPoker in the last month, and finished 3rd, 14th, 24th and 32nd (that one hurt, because only top 30 paid). I've noticed that in a real dollar tourney, you tend to lose about half of the field in the first hour, while the freerolls lose about 60-70% of the field in that first hour, so people definitely seem to be more cavalier in the freerolls at the beginning. But once the crazies are weeded out, I've found that many of the remaining players tend to play fairly normally. In fact, the one where I finished 3rd started with almost 2000 people and took almost 6 hours, which is fairly consistent with real dollar tourneys I've been in that start with about 2000 people.

I look at freerolls as an opporunity to try different approaches, like being more aggressive in LP situations than I might normally be if my money's on the line. It's an extremely cheap (obviously....) way of trying things to fix holes in your game in a semi-realistic setting.

[Beavis68]

I took some time off from cash games and messed around wiht UB freerolls for shytes and giggles, I found them fun, and I learned chip stack management pretty well.

Now that I am playing cash games again I have found my MTT play has improved.

I developed kind of a Daniel Negraneau style that I never would have developed if I had to pony up cash every game.

I also get expirience playing tighter more aggressive and loose passive tables.