There are many benefits for the beginner as well as for the experienced players in online poker. One of the better promotions are free-rolls. A free-roll is a tournament where the house/poker room has paid the entire prize pool and the players can enter for free. The players thus compete for money without risking any of their own. The free-rolls are in many cases around $100-$500 but due to the high competition that exists in the online poker market, the poker rooms have been racing against each other and it is not uncommon that free-rolls with a prize pool of $5,000-$10,000 are held for the players.

For a player with limited bank roll this is a golden opportunity to score a decent amount of money within a few hours of play. Note that most poker rooms have requirements players must fulfill before they can participate. Such as, new player free-rolls which only are open for new players that have registered an account and deposited money, or free-rolls open for all players but they must have played a certain amount of raked hands within a limited period of time. Most poker rooms have a loyalty program, for example a points program that awards points for playing with real money. These points are common to use for free-roll buy-ins.

Free-rolls are beside the potential chance of a real money win also good for practicing tournaments, the players do not risk any of their own money and they often get to play against a large field of players. It will help most players to have been practicing tournaments with real money at stakes before they start paying up the entrance fee to tournaments themselves.

There are many players in free-rolls who do not care about the money and play any two cards or players who do not even show up, so by playing very tight in the beginning you will beat a large number of the field. But you must of course gather a decent stack of chips to get late in tournaments, especially if the field is big, so do not play super-tight for too long.