freerolls or depositing for beginner

I need some suggestions on freerolls or depositing. Is there any chance of really building a roll playing freerolls or would this take years for this? Is it better to deposit from the start and build a roll?

Yes it's possible to build a bankroll from freeroll winnings, it takes time and it really depends on how big a bankroll you want.

I generally play for fun I'm never going to be good enough to earn serious money playing poker, but in the last 4 years I have taken some fairly modest freeroll winnings to an online bankroll of around $5000.

The way I did it was to find a site that would allow you to withdraw winnings even though you haven't deposited, I think at the time I used a merge skin. After I'd won a bit I moved that out to Neteller, from there I could move money around sites that would only allow withdrawals after you have deposited to free up my freeroll winnings there. Another good source of funds has been forum freerolls and money added buyins. I've moved away from freerolls now as they are so frustrating dealing with the all in maniacs. Having said that I won $45 on a new depositors freeroll on Littlewoods poker last night, but thats rare now.

As for depositing well I'm glad I never started that way I would have lost money to start with and I hate losing money it would have probably been put off playing and I get a huge amount of enjoyment out of this frustrating silly little game

Play freerolls if you're a beginner. If you're already good enough to beat the small stakes, then deposit. If you're not good enough to beat freerolls, you'll just lose your initial deposit anyways.

Also, playing freerolls will give you the basic tools to survive in micro stakes so it's a good opportunity to learn. You may think it's a huge donk fest but there are lessons to be learned (primarily value betting and patience).

Really you can go either way. If you have a little patience then I would suggest the FR aproach first. There are a lot of FR options out there and with one cash you can jump into the micro stakes and start building from there. I personally deposited first, but that was before micro stakes and you has to have a few bucks to sit down at any real table.

Not at all

You can easily win money doing freerolls. You can win or place in freerolls then either play small cash games or at the small money tables. I have actually gotten over 300$ from starting with nothing. I won a freeroll for $9. Then built it up to 25. at the 2/4 cent tables. Then i entered a 4.40$ tournament and won!. 180 people, i won over 240$. All in all, you do not have to deposit, and if you do play at the small tournaments or small cash tables, watch out. Fish suck out their ALL the time. Almost every hand.

If you don't know how to play, then play freerolls to learn relative strength of hands on certain board textures/basic principles like position, etc. But, once you feel you are at a stage where you could beat micro sngs or cash, I would deposit like $50 unless losing that money would be serious for you (stars is a good site, coz they have huge volume of players and they offer such terrible deposit bonuses that you don't lose out in the future by only depositing a small amount). Alternatively, if you aren't from the US you could probably sign up for a free bankroll on some ipoker site and use that to start (first you'd have to make sure you'd be able to withdraw having never made a deposit).

But trying to build a bankroll from freeroll winnings is probably more likely to make you lose your mind before you build a roll.

Either one can be done, but i would definitly advice on the depositing.
Playing freerolls is a way to get money for free and everyone is soo
excited by them, but its not for free! Infact it takes many hours of your
days to actually manage to get a small amount of money! and by that time
you would have gotten more money selling hotdogs on the street! Plus
you dont learn much from freerolls cause you play against some really
bad and loose players, so both ways i would advice against it being the
method of getting your initial roll.

Just get a free bankroll offer and nurse it up.

I would recommend the freerolls to start with. However stick to the quality freerolls e.g. Cardschat or similar forums. It is possible to win these but the open freerolls on FT and PS have thousands in them and are hard to build from. If you need some encouragement I have built up toover $300 from a zero srat on freerolls.

I also recommend you start out with freerolls, they will force you to improve your poker game and also help you learn bankroll management without using your own money, you will have to grind your way up and you will become a winning poker player if you do complete building your bankroll from scratch through nothing but freerolls. You may want to try bodog or cakepoker the have decent freeroll offerings and also the freerolls offered by forums, the have a smaller field compared to those open freerolls. gl with what ever you decide

I keep playing freerolls, trying to get a bank of any kind. I just keep getting confirmed that I am not ready for any serious money. I get like a couple bucks from free rolls and promptly lose them in cash games. I keep trying, as I enjoy the game. Who knows, maybe one day I will actually be good at it!

that depends on you,if you know you can win a freeroll,a tournament it worth to try,but you can also deposit some money for your fun playing on line!

I think especially as a beginner, try out some freerolls and see what you can do to learn the game against (often but not always) some sub-par competition. Or even the higher stakes play money simulates a low buy-in money game. It just depends on how you feel imo. A lot of sites require a desposit in order to withdrawl so you may have to despoit anyway at some point. Just my 2c.

As many others have said, start with the freerolls.
Practice PATIENCE when playing these, play ONLY premium hands.
Wait till the first break to start getting aggressive.

Take whatever profit you make and play micro stakes TIGHTLY!

I have been playing for 3 years on FTP's money. It all started with a $2 freeroll win.

It depends on what you do in the day. If you work a 40 hour week, then you probably don't have time to come home and sit in a freeroll for 5 hours and hope you win a few bucks. If this is the case I would probably deposit $50 or something and see where it goes. It also depends on where you live (U.S, Europe?) because that will tell you how easy it is to get your money back if you win.

If you have tons and tons of free time on your hands then it can't hurt to play a bunch of freerolls every day to get your bank account started. I'm not sure about one thing though -- some poker sites make you deposit before you can cash out -- not sure which but just keep that in mind. And if you end up depositing and lose it all then you should re-evaluate so you don't keep draining your bank. That would happen to me since I have a slight gambling problem.

WurlyQ said:

If you're not good enough to beat freerolls, you'll just lose your initial deposit anyways.

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Not at all, I started trying to build from nothing but i just could not be arsed sitting thru 5 hrs of play to win a minuscule amount of money, hats off to chris ferguson and anyone else that can do it b/c they must have the patience of a saint but i dont think its the right road for a lot of people.

In my case, i was young free and single when i really started to get into poker and had a nice amount of disposable income to play with at the tables, the best route for me was to deposit and learn my lessons the hard way, the way doyle, chip reese etc all learnt, by losing your hard earned cold cash. I'm not talking huge amounts of money here, like $50-100 max each time i deposited but it was enough to make me be annoyed about losing through mistakes i made and subsequently learn from said mistakes.

It's all dependant on your own personal circumstances, how much disposable income you have, how much time you have on your hands and what kind of poker you want to play in the future, if you know you want to play MTT's and become a guru of that field then yeah i dont see the harm in learning to trudge through all the freerolls and build up from nothing but say for example you want to play cash, just deposit like $50 and play 2nl FR, it's pretty impossible to go broke playing 2nl with 25 BI's imo.

If you are new to online poker I would suggest playing free rolls to get acquainted with the slightly different type of play. I know of at least one player who from free rolls has made a very large amount of money with no deposits. He is currently at 208K from free rolls. He won a small BR and then played some small buy ins. He got very lucky and won a $9000.00 guarantee and never looked back. GL to you on and off the felts

There are some sites that offer some good freerolls,you just have to search for them.
You can build a good bankroll by playing in private freerolls like the awesome ones we have here.
I know players only have some pretty big freerolls,
check out online forum challenge or the ofc,be sure to reprsent cardschat if you do play in any of the ofc events.

Depends

If you are just starting poker and are not great at it. It will take you a while to place in a freeroll. If you are pretty good, you do not have to deposit. I started and was pretty good, it did take me a while to place in a freeroll, over 2 months for only about 3$. Freerolls will not teach you great poker, considering 95% of players are fish, but also at the .2/.4 cash tables, those are 95% fish as well. Deposit 20$ and see where you go from there. I have actually been over 350$ without depositing.