A "freeroll" is a poker tournament with no buy-in that offers cash or prizes to the winners. It's a promotional device that a lot of online poker rooms and poker forums use to generate traffic and interest to their websites. Most of the time they're mostly just good for bragging rights, because the prize pools are naturally a lot smaller than they would be at a poker tournament with a buy-in, but a lot of folks really enjoy freerolls.

Freerolls offer some of the following advantages:

• No buy-in
• They don't cost anything to play in
• They're free
• You don't have to worry about losing any money in them (Have you started to detect a theme here?)
• Since they're free, have no buy-in, and don't cost anything to play, you always have a positive expected value
• You can win your way into some pretty big tourneys with some pretty big prize pools playing freerolls if you keep your eyes open for them. You could theoretically win your way into the World Poker Tour or the World Series of Poker even.

There are some drawbacks to playing in freerolls:

• Bluffing doesn't work as well, since there's nothing on the line other than the prize money
• The hourly rate you can expect from freerolling is a lot lower than if you're a winning ring player at even the lowest levels
• It can be frustrating to go out early or on the bubble when someone sucks out on you with 27 offsuit
• Your play may suffer if you play too many freerolls. Adjusting to cash games can be difficult, and un-learning bad habits can be harder than learning good habits.

If you're interested in the whole freeroll poker thing, here are a couple of places you can find some cool freeroll info:

Freerolls is a website devoted specifically to freeroll tournaments.

Poker Prophet is a poker strategy forum that hosts freerolls roughly every 2 weeks or so at various online poker rooms.

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Randy