Freerolls – The American Dream

By Author: thomasgalvin
Total Articles: 612
Comment this article

Freerolls is gold digging

Starting out your career playing poker Freerolls is a lot like being a gold digger. You come with nothing, you invest nothing and you will probably not make much – BUT there is a chance you will. The nothing part is not entirely true because just like the gold digger needed some food, some tool and a place to sleep, you need a computer, an internet connection and some extra time on your hand. But the dream is the same – to find the gold! When you are playing freerolls you will never find the big gold mine straight away you might win a few bucks here and there but what you might find eventually and which is the real gold – you might find out how to play poker and that is a borderline revelation. I will not tell you a story about how easy it is to become a poker pro because it is probably only five to ten per cent of you freeroll players who will ever become real winning players. The rest of you will have given up as it is too hard to win, you don’t want to spent hours playing for small money, the other always gets lucky and by the way ...
... they are also retards and so on. I know all the explanations heard them a million times and I understand them perfectly. But there are a few who is able to hang in there, having discipline, keep trying to learn the game, developing the skills, hunting the luck and unlike the gold diggers they will get there.

No talent

Did you notice that I so far not mention the word talent? For the gold digger having success it requires the god given requisite that He had put gold in the earth or rocks where the gold digger was digging to hit the riches. The same you could say about the poker player that he needed some kind of God given talent to be a winning poker player. Talent might have some influence on your poker career. But talent probably does like one percent of your poker skills, but that one percent is what differs Stu Ungar, Tom Dwan and a couple of the other big guys from the rest of us. Becoming a good poker player from playing freerolls is 99% hard work. Hard work but fun work. I still remember my biggest poker victory ever – and this might sound fun as I have made hundreds of thousands dollars – when I back then reached a bankroll of 1 dollar from playing small sng freerolls after a month of playing online when I had the time for – I went out in front of my mirror at my 8 square meter dormitory room and said to myself ‘You can do it!’ and after that I was progressing crushing basically all stakes within half a year on the site I played on back then. But I stayed on healthy track never risking more than I could afford to lose – I didn’t have the money to invest if I went broke and I had no intention of beginning from scratch again so I played disciplined and used a strict - what I later found out was called – bankroll management.

Playing poker freerolls can be the kick start for you to become a poker pro. But only if you allow it! Winning in freerolls take a lot of time and you shouldn’t expect just to win the first and the best freeroll – often poker freerolls have thousands of players – the ones at Poker-Freeroller.com typically have between six-seven players to 1.500 players depending on which one you choose. There some freeroll players who are today very famous and below we have a list of some of those:

Freeroll pros – the famous ones

Some freeroll pros are more authentic than others but they all have an interesting story. Here are the stories of Anette Obrestad and Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson

Anette ‘Anette_15’ Obrestad – used the freerolls to start her career

Anette Obrestad is a young girl from Norway who started playing poker in an early age – earlier than when you are allowed to play. So she couldn’t deposit any money as she was younger than 18 years old so she made an account with a different age and started playing freerolls. She never stopped playing tournament poker and she is now one of the best online and live tournament players in the world. Without comparison the best female poker player in the world.

In the professional poker environment she is famous for making an instructional poker video on an online multitable poker table tournament without seeing her cards. And only play according to position, betsizes and reads. Probably the reason for her being famous for the video is she took down the tournament. She was only allowed to look at her cards if her opponents pushed all in.
In 2007 World Series of Poker hit Europe for the first time – to be more exact London. This meant a debut for Anette_15 in the real live poker tournaments. She had been unable to join the WSOPs in USA because of the age limit of 21. This didn’t count in London where you just need to be 18 years old to play. So what happened was that the girl who started her career playing freerolls took down the first European WSOP. Today Anette Obrestad has made more than 3 million dollars in live winnings and most likely a lot more online which is her primary sphere. Anette Obrestad is a real gold digger – she came with nothing and took everything. And today in an age of 22 she is a millionaire.

Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson –Freerolls the rebirth of a star

The story of Chris Ferguson playing freerolls is very unlike Anette_15’s story. The story of Chris is a story of a player who rose to extreme heights won everything and then started losing. Chris Ferguson was already playing poker by the age of 10. And in 2000 he won the main event of the World Series of Poker. And made several major cashes after that. In 2010 he had won live tournament prizes for over eight million dollars. But online things were turning bad.

Chris Ferguson started losing money online. He moved from the highest stakes around down to lower stakes and he decided to stay at Nl1000 when he reached his bottom. Didn’t work well for him and he busted his online roll. But instead of going into some kind of ludomaniac frenzy. He decided that this was a good turning point. Chris made a plan. Step one was to go from a bankroll of 0 dollars to 10.000. He made it but let’s have a look on how he described the process:
Starting out I’d often manage to a dollar or two (editor: in the freerolls), but I’d quickly get busted and have to start over again. It took some time, after awhile, I was eventually able to graduate to games that required an actual buy-in.

Even today, people don’t believe it’s really me when I sit down at Full Tilt’s small stakes games. They ask what I’m doing down here, and often tell me stories about how they turned $5 into $500 or $100 into $1,000. Usually, these stories end with the person telling me that they went broke. There’s no surprise there. These folks tried to quickly to build a bankroll by gambling. They’d play in a game that was beyond their bankroll and, if they happened to win, they’d move up to a higher limit and risk it all one more time. Inevitable, they’d lose a few big hands and go broke.
For me, this experiment isn’t about the money. It’s about showing how, with a proper bankroll management , you can start from nothing and move up to the point where you are playing in some pretty big games.

Today Chris Ferguson’s bankroll exceeds 100.000 dollars and that without taking in count what he has made live. He gives three very specific advices to players who starts from the scratch and start making money from Freerolls:

1.Never buy into a cash game or a Sit & Go with more than 5 percent of your total bankroll (exception: you are always allowed to buy-in in the minimum games if that what you made it to with your freerolls)

2.Never buy into a multi-table tournaments for more than 2 percent of your bankroll.

3.If at any time during a No-Limit or Pot-Limit cash-game session the money on the table represent more than 10 percent of my total bankroll I must leave the game when the blinds reach to me.

Find Freerolls related information at poker-freeroller.com