Poker Time Irish Freerolls
For the week leading up to St. Patrick’s Day, Poker Time created a series of no-restriction online poker freerolls for all of their players. There were 3 types. A $400 winner take all format; a $200 with regular payouts; and a $50 with regular payouts.
These are casino games promos that create action around their site. The money that they are giving away isn’t very much, and they are likely to get the winners to play the money on their site, instead of cashing it out. For the small stakes poker online player, or someone who used to play on the site, these freerolls are golden opportunities. There is no commitment and no risk.
When I was playing these, throughout the week, I noticed their regular $100 freerolls occurred a few times a day. The payouts in these were much more spread out. In the Irish $50 freeroll, they only paid out 5 places, but all of the payouts were in dollar amounts. In the $100 freeroll, they paid 260 places, but most of the payouts were less than a dollar, I think even less than a quarter. Kind of a joke.
The $100 freeroll I played in had 10,218 players vying for $100. Within a half hour, we were down to 3,572 players, practically 1/3 of the starting field. People were playing terribly and going all in every hand. But like a normal tournament, the only big prizes were at the final table. Why would you want to wade through 10,000 people to make 15 cents?!
The Irish freerolls cut out the useless payouts and just awarded the top 4 players. While this makes it more unrealistic to win anything, it’s a freeroll. People aren’t looking to make 15 or 20 cents, they are looking for an actual win that they can parlay into some more earnings. Though I never won any money, I was reintroduced to the website, which had a lot more features than it used to. The visuals were sharper. You could rabbit hunt. It was just a much more positive playing atmosphere than I remembered it. I’m sure that the Irish freerolls brought a lot of old players back to Poker Time as well as made a few lucky winners very happy.
