Marginalpoker

All poker sites have free poker games, whether they be play money games or freeroll poker tournaments where you don’t have to buy in for anything and you have a shot at making money out of thin air. The fact remains that with online poker, you have an opportunity to be able to make money out of thin air.

I had a player contact me last year who had made around $4000 in the space of a year simply by playing freerolls. Some people may look at that and think, yeah but how many hours has he played and what is his hourly rate?

But is this really the way that we should be looking at his achievement? If you turn $2000 into $4000 then you have shown a $2000 profit on $2000 so your ROI (return on investment) is 100%. Now 100% is an unbelievable return on investment! If you turn $1 into $4000 then your ROI is 4000%. But turning $0 into $4000 is a return that is infinite. Any poker player who has made money without having to invest anything is to be commended in my opinion.

Sure the regular players and the professionals may knock them but they are wrong to do so. There have been numerous bankroll challenges over the past few years where players have tried to turn mediocre sums of money into huge amounts and succeeded. The strong base that is needed is iron money management skills.

You must keep discipline at all times but if you can do this then you really can make money out of nothing. I tried my own bankroll challenge a couple of years ago and tried turning $1000 into $100,000 over the space of a year and had to pack it up through other work commitments. Once you get into the proper mindset, you can do this but the difficult part is ploughing through the first few months where you basically have to play poker without making any progress whatsoever.

There may be several thousand players in these freeroll poker tournaments and it is going to take you a ling time in all probability to be able to get away from ground zero or in this case… $0. But sooner or later you will cash in a freeroll event and you will be on your way. Then it is a simple case of grinding at the lower limits at a game that you are strongest in.

Say for example that you have cashed in a $1000 freeroll for $50, you then have numerous ways to go. You now have something to work with and if you can now take advantage of a rakeback deal as well then you are on your way. I would now be looking to fragment that $50 into at least 10 buy-ins and play $5 no-limit games.

The level of play in these poker games is very bad as you would expect and a decent player could make something like10 to 20 buy-ins over the space of a month depending on how many hours they put in.

Let us say that you made the lower end of that figure and made ten buy-ins during the next month after you cashed in your freeroll for the $50. Now you have $100 in your bankroll and you could either stay at the $5 level and be even better bankrolled or move up to the $10 games with the same ten buy-ins.

If you dropped down from $100 to $50 then you could drop back down a level to the $5 games where you would have the same ten buy-ins again. On sites that have micro levels then you can play really low levels like these and slowly build yourself up. Once you get to the $25 level with a bankroll of between $250-$500 then you can start to make some decent progress very quickly and the $10,000 mark will seem a whole lot nearer when you are multi-tabling making something like $10/hour.