Freerolls

I just got knocked out of a special blogger freeroll held by PokerStars. I had been running in the top 10% until this happened:



I was out two hands later. Boo hoo.

But the game got me to thinking again about how people play freeroll tournaments. Anybody who has played an online freeroll will have noticed that some meaningful percentage of participants play as if the results don't matter. They open-shove starting with the first hand, any two cards.

As with so many things in poker--and in life generally, for that matter--I just don't understand people. This makes no sense at all.

Surely what they must be thinking is along these lines: "I have nothing invested in this tournament, so I have nothing to lose by going out early." But that's just plain wrong. They do have something to lose. By playing stupidly, they lose their chance at whatever the first-place prize money is. (In this case, PokerStars put up $5000, though I don't check to see how it was to be distributed.) If the amount you might win isn't worth your time and energy, fine, don't bother signing up. But once you've made the determination that your equity in the prize pool merits the investment of however many hours you estimate it will take to play to the end, it's completely irrational to play a suboptimal game. The fact that you had to pay nothing to register is an utterly irrelevant fact, but these crazy players seem to view it as not only relevant, but as the determining factor in how they approach the tournament.

Interestingly, I have not noticed the same phenomenon when playing live freerolls, or at least not to the same degree. I used to do a freeroll every month at the Hilton, and there were very few players who were willing to be more reckless than I think they would have been if they paid to play. Perhaps the difference is because they feel invested in the tournament seat through the many hours they spent qualifying for it (and, for many, the cash they lost in the process)--as opposed to an online freeroll, which is most often given without having had to invest anything at all.

Today I lost my chance at whatever percentage of the $5000 was set aside for first place, but I'm not embarrassed about how it happened. I played my best, got my money in good, got unlucky in a crucial spot, and won nothing--which, in the nature of tournament play, is always the most likely outcome, even for the best players (a group in which I do not include myself). Had I shoved in the first orbit for 75 big blinds with J-6 offsuit and been busted by Q-Q, I wouldn't just tell myself, "Oh well, it was a freeroll anyway." I'd look myself in the mirror and ask, "What the hell were you thinking, you moron?"