FullTilt Poker You’ll find the FullTilt freerolls in the playmoney section, under the Tournament tab, the All tab. They run every few hours and usually have several thousand people in them. Some of the freerolls pay Tournament Dollars, T$, which can be used to buy-in to any tournament, but not to buy-in to a cash game.

Now that you’re registered for every site, start signing up for their freerolls. You should be logged in to every site playing every freeroll that’s available. The more tables you play at a time, the more money you’ll make per hour on your computer. Since you’ll likely be playing more than 1 table at a time, you may want to increase your screen resolution so the tables will fit on your screen with less overlapping. One thing that advanced players will do is have multiple monitors on a single computer so they can play 8+ tables at a single time without having any of the tables overlap. Once you’ve signed up for all the sites and have started playing freerolls, it’s time to work on improving your game. The sooner you become a winning player, the sooner you’ll be winning freerolls, and the sooner you’ll be playing cash games for big bucks.

Step 2: Learn Optimal All-in Strategy For simplicity, I’m going to divide the stages of the tournament into 2 stages. The first stage I consider "early", and the second stage is "late". "Early" would be any time your stack size is 20 times the big blind. "Late" would be any time your stack size is less than 15 times the big blind. If the tournament has just started and the blinds are 15/30, and you start with 1500 chips, then your stack size is 1500 divided by the 30 big blind, or 50 times the big blind. If the tournament has been running for a while and the blinds are 50/100 and you are down to 1000 in chips, then you have 1000 divided by the 100 big blind, or 10 times the big blind, and you are in the "late" stages of the tournament. In the early stages of a tournament, or when you have more than 20 times the big blind, you will want to play according to the strategy guide found here that you’ll find later in this article.

The blinds in most freerolls rise fairly quick. This means you don’t have a very large stack in relation to the size of the blinds for very long. Most of the play in a freeroll will be when you’re stack size is about 10 times the size of the big blind. At that level, even the minimum raise preflop will have you putting in 20% of your entire stack. If someone raises and you have to fold, you’ve practically thrown away 20% of your chances of winning. Even if someone just calls, you still have to hit at least a pair on the flop to be able to bet or call. A better option is to wait for a premium hand and push all-in. An all-in push is less likely to get called than a small raise, and at this level you don’t want to be called. If everyone folds and you win the blinds, you’ve just increased your stack by 15%, without even having to see a showdown. On the rare occasion you do get called, you will likely have a better hand than your opponent and will double your stack more than half the time. This may seem like a wild/maniac strategy, but it is very hard to counter, because anyone that might want to play back at you will have to risk a lot of chips to do it, and they won’t be able to bluff you off you’re hand because you are simply all-in.

This type of play is often referred to as "Pushbotting" and there have been charts made that show close to optimal play. One such chart is linked as a .pdf file here at ProPoker Pushbot Chart. Read that chart cover to cover. Read it slowly. Read it again. Make sure you understand how to use it. Familiarize yourself with common hands and common situations so you don’t need to look at it for every decision. Print it out and keep a copy nearby so you can quickly reference it when a situation comes up you aren’t sure on. If you don’t have time to look up the correct play before it’s your turn to act, save the hand history and look it up later so you’ll know what to do next time the situation arises.

Step 3: Read the Early Stage Tournament Guide The Early Stage Tournament Strategy Guide will give you enough of a foundation to start playing a few hands earlier in the tournament, before the blinds get so large that you are in push or fold territory. Poker is a very complex game though and there is no single guide that can tell you how to play from start to finish, so it is important that you keep learning.

Step 4: Read the 2+2 forums Go to the www.twoplustwo.com tournament forums and read the MTT FAQ sticky at the top of the page. After you are done reading that, read every post on the first 5 pages. After you are done doing that, register and post replies. Ask questions about hands you don’t understand. Post your thoughts on how hands should have been played. Post hands that you have played and are confused about. This may seem like a lot of work for little reward since at this point, even if you win a freeroll after doing all this work, it will probably be less than $15. But, what you are learning now will stay with you forever. When you start playing real money games and move up in limits, it will be much easier and you will experience much less headaches if you not only learned how to play correctly, but learned how to learn how to play correctly. Practice good study habits early and often.

Step 5: Learn How to Analyze Hands On Your Own You won’t always have someone there that can give you correct advice. It’s important to be able to look at a hand you’ve played and analyze it on your own and determine the correct play. A good way to do this is to use the REM method described in Ed Miller’s book. REM stands for Range, Equity, Maximize. Equity is simply the chance you have of winning. You can figure out correct play of almost any poker hand by putting your opponent on a Range of hands, determining your Equity against that range, and Maximizing your expected winnings based off of those. Being able to put people on a range of hands is a skill best learned by playing. Pay attention to how people play. Is you’ve played 50 hands with someone and they’ve never raised before the flop, then when they do raise, you can expect them to have a premium hand. You can narrow their range down to maybe AA-JJ, or AK-AJ. If someone has pushed all-in every hand for 6 hands in a row, you can narrow their range down to any 2 cards :). Either way, once you determine their range, you can put that range into a software program that will run simulations and tell you how much equity your hand has against their range. One such software program that is available for free is pokerstove.com. Download this program and learn how to use it. You can also visit propokertools.com. They have web-based simulators that you don’t have to download. They also work for holdem, along with other poker games, like omaha and stud.

Step 6: Continue Reading Twoplustwo and Other Poker Forums There are many poker forums and resources out there available for free:

pocketfives.com
unitedpokerforum.com
internettexasholdem.com
flopturnriver.com

As you move out of tournaments and into other games, any book from twoplustwo publishing is worth more than it’s weight in gold. I hope you’ve learned a thing or two and I hope you have as much success as I have at the tables. Shuffle up and Deal!

Join them all and absorb every bit of information you can get your hand on. There is enough information out there for free that you can become a big winner at the small stakes games without ever spending a dime on your poker career. There will come a time however when you have exausted every resource the internet has to offer you and you would be handicapping yourself by not spending a few bucks on some books or training sites. Step 7: Begin Building a Poker Library If I were going to focus on tournament poker to make serious money, here is a list of the 4 most important books I would read, in the order I would read them. Theory of Poker by David Sklansky Tournament Poker for Advanced Players by David Sklansky FullTilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition by FullTilt Pro’s Harrington on Hold’em Vol 1 & 2

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