Online Poker Tournaments and Freerolls

Anyone that has ever looked at the page about Poker Tournaments of any online Poker site has experienced some confusion. Every site uses its own brevity codes to make as much information as possible to the player. If you don't understand the possible structures, how can you make sense of these arcane brevity codes? These abbreviations can make the military acronyms look simple.

Both of these were found on a single online Poker site.

Turbo 1x1 $20 NL STT

Speed $15 NL - 6 Seats [STT]

Here we are going to break down the most popular structures, and hopefully armed with that knowledge you can decipher the tournament board on most online Poker rooms.

You would think that selection of the game would be simple but it can be complicated. Anyone, that plays a lot of online poker tournaments, has ended up in an Omaha HiLo, instead of a Texas Hold'em Tournament or at 7 Card Stud HiLo instead of 7 Card Stud table. Then we will look at the price and the prize structures, which can be quite intriguing, when dealing with "Free Tournaments." Finally we will look at the starting stacks, blinds, and blind progression. Because these will affect our strategy as we play in the different free rolls available at online Poker rooms.

Very few poker sites have freerolls that are absolutely free. Most have some sort of real money requirement either to enter or to collect the winnings. Online Poker sites offer free rolls to:

* Increase traffic at the site

* Entice new players to play more

* Reward regular players for playing at the site

Hollywood Poker is a great place for poker freerolls and poker tournaments.

Using Online Poker to Benefit Live Poker

Below is a list of variables that can help in deciding whether or not online poker is for you:

1. The comfort level you have that the online poker cardroom will pay the winners and not abscond with player deposits

2. Whether or not online poker is clearly legal, clearly illegal, or somewhere in uncharted and muddy waters where you live. The answer varies from country to country and from state to state, and in quite a few places the answer is not at all clear. As a subsidiary issue, if you live in either a clearly illegal jurisdiction, you need to make a personal decision about whether or not you’re willing to play. To this point, the only people who have gotten into trouble are site operators and/or owners, and in a couple of rare cases, where the activity was used as a "back door" to go after someone wanted for far more serious crimes

3. How comfortable you are with an online poker site’s customer service, including but not limited to how proactive the site is in seeking out and barring colluders, abusive players (usually a removal of chat privileges is enough on this one), and players who are clearly abusing the all-in maneuver when they want to see their hand to the end but don’t want to invest any more money in it.

4. What you think your poker strengths and weaknesses are: a player whose winning talents are based almost entirely on what seems to border on a preternatural ability to “read” opponent tells is probably much better off playing brick and mortar; someone who lacks a good poker face and realizes that his technical skills far outweigh his people skills is probably much better off playing online.

5. How far you live from legal cardrooms, and/or how much easy access there is to private games where you are comfortable with the stakes, the variety of games played, the probability of facing cheaters, unhappy spouses, cleaning up arrangements, the probability of a loser’s check clearing, and the probability of the game getting hijacked (robbed) or busted by the authorities.