Early Stage Freeroll Strategy

“It is not the strongest, nor the smartest species that survive, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s quote is applicable to all of poker in a general sense, but it’s uniquely applicable to freerolls.
Freerolls are a form of poker unlike any other. While you’ll use the same deck and follow the same rules as you would in a normal game of poker, the nature of freerolls – specifically that they don’t force your opponents to risk anything to enter – changes the game dramatically.
Players who can best adapt their strategy to this change are those who are most likely to survive and thrive in freeroll play.

In this article, we’re going to focus on how deviating from standard poker strategy can work to your advantage in the early stages of freerolls.
Some of the advice will make sense immediately, while other parts of it may seem counter-intuitive. Even if the advice really runs counter to your current strategy, give it a try – after all, what do you have to lose?

Below you’ll find a handful of specific strategic suggestions for early stage freeroll play, each with a brief explanation and justification.
If you’re looking more for tournament advice in general, here’s our take on the top five poker books about tournament play.
If you’re not only a freeroll player, you might like some of our other articles on freezeout or rebuy poker tournament strategy.

Isolate players as often as you possibly can.

Your edge in freeroll tournaments comes from being more skilled than each individual opponent (or at least the majority of individual opponents).
However, the value of that edge declines significantly as more and more players enter the pot.
While you may be better than each individual opponent, a group of inferior players collectively has a greater ability to outplay you (and more importantly, to outflop you. Basically, the whole of your opponents is greater than the sum of their individual parts, so you should work to keep their ranks as slim as possible.
Use preflop and, to a lesser extent, flop bets and raises to discourage as many people as you can from getting in the pot when you have strong hands, especially those hands that play best against one or two opponents like big unpaired cards and medium pairs such as eights.

Be more willing to make large overbets.

People in freerolls are often just waiting to pull the trigger.
While you’ll certainly find some tight players in freerolls, you’ll also never lack for opponents who are looking to gamble it up.
Additionally, most freerolls have blind structures that escalate quickly, providing even more motivation for players to call loosely.
The result is that you should strongly consider making large overbets with your strong hands, both preflop and post flop.
Even if you don’t get called, you’ll get another bonus: your image will become wilder, and your next large move stands a much better chance of being called as a result.

Commit to more hands preflop – as the aggressor.

In a regular freezeout, you’d be a little goofy if you stuck in your entire stack preflop with AQ or 88, but in freerolls, it’s more than acceptable – it’s advisable.
Again, it comes down to relative hand strength – against competent opponents, playing big pots with those sorts of hands in the early stages is a disaster, because no one is going to play a big pot against you without a hand that’s significantly stronger on average.
In a freeroll, however, hand valuations change. More people are willing to get stuck to a small pair, a big suited hand, even a raggedy ace.
While it will sting the few times your opponents do have aces and you jam with AQ (even bad players get aces, sadly), it will be the exception and not the rule.

Hopefully these tips will help you get more out of your chips in the early stages of freerolls.
Just remember, if more people start playing this way, that’s when it’s time for you to change your game again in an attempt to always stay one evolutionary step ahead of the competition.