Low Stakes Poker - Low Stakes Poker Player

Many successful online poker players have never made a deposit to an online poker room. How is this possible? Through freeroll tournaments.

What is a freeroll tournament?

Freeroll tournaments are one of life’s few chances to win something for nothing. Some online poker rooms, such as Everest Poker, regularly hold freeroll tournaments (one of their current promotions lets players take their shot at a $2,500 prize pool without having to risk a penny). This may sound too good to be true, but there isn’t a catch. It really is possible to win real money playing online poker without ever having to risk a dime of your own money.

Warning: Grinding Required

While it’s not hard to win money through no-limit hold’em freeroll tournaments, it can be hard turning those winnings into anything meaningful. Cashing in a freeroll tournament will often yield a payout as small as just a few cents. It can be very challenging turning a handful of change into a significant online poker bankroll.

For starters, play the lowest stakes available on the network. If you win $1 or $2 in a freeroll tournament, you can use that money to play $.01-$.02 no-limit hold’em. Since players at these stakes tend to be generally awful, one could conceivably build a $1 bankroll into several hundred dollars provided they are very disciplined.

Sit-’N’-Go Approach

Another way to utilize one’s freeroll tournament winnings is to roll the dice on a sit-’n’-go tournament. Many online poker rooms (Titan Poker and Gnuf to name a few) offer extremely low buy-in sit-’n’-go tournaments. For example, at Gnuf, they have tournaments with buy-ins that start as low as $.10. These can be a great way to parlay a few cents into a workable poker bankroll.

The sit-’n’-go approach tends to have more variance than grinding cash games. It’s not uncommon to have a streak of 10 or more tournaments where one fails to win any money. So if your first couple of tries in a sit-’n’-go are unsuccessful, try not to be too hard on yourself. Remember, even Phil Ivey goes through stretches of losing in tournaments.

Strings Attached

The only downside to online freeroll tournaments is that everyone is chasing the same free money as yourself. On some of the larger online poker rooms, freeroll tournaments attract thousands of players. To combat this, many poker rooms require players to exchange a certain number of “points” for entry into a freeroll. Usually, these points are earned through participating in real-money games on their network. Of course, to participate in real money games, one will either need to make a deposit or win money through a freeroll. One option is to make the minimum deposit (some poker rooms allow deposits as small as $10) and play low stakes games to collect a lot of player points. Once you have enough player points, you can start joining some of the more “exclusive” freeroll tournaments void of hoards of freeloaders who have never played real-money poker before.

Low stakes poker players often have a hard time finding a game to their liking in a casino. Some casinos will spread games as small as $2/$4 or $3/$6 limit. No-limit poker games rarely get smaller than games with $1/$2 blinds. While these games might be considered “small stakes” in brick-and-mortar poker games, one could still easily lose over $100.

For poker players who don’t want to risk losing more than a couple of dollars, thankfully there’s online poker. Many online poker rooms spread very, very affordable poker games. Just how low can you go?

Some online poker rooms like Titan Poker offer no-limit games with blinds of $.01 and $.02. To play these games, one could buy-in for as little as $1! It’d be impossible to find such small games in a casino poker room.

Of course, what costs less than $.01? Something that costs nothing! Thanks to the internet, there are plenty of ways to enjoy poker for free. One might think that playing poker for free is a great way to practice poker strategy. This is actually not true. Many play money online poker games are filled with players who have no incentive to play in a manner that simulates real-money conditions. In other words, play money games are often filled with people playing like clowns. After all, what do they have to lose?

To hone one’s poker skills in an environment where other players actually want to win, low stakes online poker is the way to go. Sure, you might wind up losing a couple of dollars in the process, but who cares? For risking the cost of a sandwich, one can play low stakes online poker and begin to build their skills against other players at any time of the day.

Who knows? Maybe all that practice will have you with a little pocket money and the confidence to take on the players at the casino!

When starting out playing poker, many people believe they can play for fake money (play money) and then transition for real money. This simply is not the case. There’s a big difference between fake money games and real-money games.

In fake money games, there’s no incentive to fold whatsoever. All of the online poker sites will give you unlimited amounts of fake money, so there’s no major reason to conserve your chips. Obviously, in a real money game, you don’t have an unlimited amount of cash (if you do, congrats!) so people actually play seriously. Some play-money players play for pride (some nice alliteration huh?), but that incentive is not nearly as much as cold, hard cash.

In a fake money game, you will be called and paid off with all sorts of hands because people simply want to see what you have. People won’t do this in a real-money game, even if the bet is just a dollar. If you play a lot of play money games, you will get used to winning more with your ‘winning hands’ which doesn’t transition into a real-money game. Your hand selection will get too loose, and it will affect your style of play too much.

While fake money games are good to get used to the rules of Texas Hold’em or just for fun, they are not a good learning tool for transitioning into low-stakes real-money games.

This website is about succeeding at low-stakes poker, but what exactly is low-stakes. In their poker strategy articles, PokerTips.org referrs to fixed-limit Texas Hold’em games of $2-$4 or less as low-stakes. As for no-limit holdem, games with $.50-$1 blinds are considered low-stakes.

I could be politically correct and say that ‘low-stakes is whatever low-stakes is to you,’ but that would be a disservice. The truth is that low-stakes referrs to a style of play, more of a Texas No Fold’em if you will. What is low-stakes depends if you are live or online, since live games tend to be much looser than live games.

Nowadays, with online games being tougher, I’d think of fixed-limit games of $1-$2 and lower being low-stakes, and no-limit games with $.25-$.50 blinds as low-stakes. For live games, I’d say you could multiply these amounts by four or so. Pretty much any game that is $5-$10 fixed or less or no-limit with $1-$2 blinds play like low-stakes games.

Shocked by the difference? If anything, the online games are probably tougher at these limits, since they are full of nits, whereas the live games tend to be full of calling stations.