2006 World Series of Poker
Step 4, Branch Out
August 10, 2005-- by Paul Svelmoe
This is the 4th of about 6 articles about how you can make it into next year's World Series of Poker main event for little or no investment. I am giving you a step-by-step approach, with Step 4 in today's article, and more articles to come about once a week.
OK, you've come this far. You now have at least a small bankroll (under $50) built up at Titan Poker and BetFred Poker. In Step 3, we talked about opening up a Neteller account because that online banking company is the smoothest and fastest way to transfer your money from one poker site to another. One more word about Neteller. Most people start off their online poker experiences making a deposit from their checking account into their Neteller account, which is fine if that's how you want to start making deposits into your online poker site's real money accounts. However, a word of caution is in order here. If you want to use the InstaCash feature available in Neteller, it's going to cost you an 8.9% fee to fund your Neteller account from your personal or business checking account. You're paying for the convenience of immediate funding so you can start playing poker right away for real money at the moment you decide you're going to do so. I'm sure this is one of the major ways Neteller makes money, taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people are going to want instant gratification, whether it be playing online poker, gambling at other types of online casino games, or buying merchandise over the Internet. Don't fall into the trap of using InstaCash. If you don't want to go through Step 1, Step 2, and Step 3 of this series, and you'd rather start right off playing in real money buy-in events, at least make your first deposit into your Neteller account by the slower method which takes 4-5 business days, but is free. Hopefully, though, you have come here to Step 4 because you have methodically built up your bankrolls from nothing or almost nothing at all. If you've been doing well at any one site, you may already have over $50.00 in one of the sites we've discussed. You need to wait until you have the $50.00 because that's usually Neteller's minimum when making a withdrawal from a poker site into your Neteller account. If you do have over $50.00 somewhere, then you're ready for Step 5, which I'll cover in the next article, but you may as well complete Step 4 anyway because of the free money available. The point I'm getting at with Neteller is that you don't need to fund your account with money from your checking account at all. As soon as you've got at least $50 built up somewhere, and you've met the cash-out requirements there, you can withdraw to Neteller and deposit into another poker account as soon as the withdrawal is approved (which might be immediately, but could take as long as a day or two). In the next article, I'll be writing about which poker sites to deposit your $50 into to maximize your potential bonus offers. OK, now that these details are out of the way, let's move on to the meat of Step 4.
The Ongame Network
Now it's time to take advantage of some of the cheaprolls that are regularly available to you at some of the online poker rooms, that is, tournaments with very small buy-ins and with large overlays. Overlay is the term used to describe the condition where the total of buy-ins, entry fees, rebuys, add-ons, is too small to meet the prize fund. The amount of the overlay is the difference between the amount payed out and the amount brought in. The next series of online poker rooms you should join are part of a network called Ongame. Like BetFred and Titan, which share the same player membership, all the sites on the Prima network are that way too. Start with Pokerroom by clicking on the link here or the banner below.
Pokerroom is the best of the Ongame poker sites for someone with only a small bankroll because of their great money-added $1.00 buy in tournaments. On Saturdays, they add a whopping $2500 + $60 in seats to another tournament to the prize fund. On Mon-Fri, they have at least several tournaments with $1 + .10 buy-ins with various amounts of money added to the prize fund over and above the $1.00 from each player which goes into the fund. They have a maximum number of players at somewhere around 2,000, and the tournament fills up fast, so register early. They also have $100 freerolls with too many players to make it really worth it, but if you enjoy the other variations of poker besides hold'em, you'll like these 7-card stud, Omaha, and 5-card draw poker freerolls. Players are so crazy, that just by being selective in the starting hands you play, you can often finish in the top 100 or so out of 1600 or 2000 players. Download Pokerroom now by clicking here or on the banner above.
If you are free to play online poker at either 12 noon or 6 PM ET (7 days a week), you might also want to download EuroPoker and/or HoldemPoker, also Ongame Network poker sites, because of their fabulous $500 daily freerolls. Although these freerolls may require you to play raked hands and/or make a small deposit before you can cash out your winnings, they are worth downloading and playing on because it is usually fairly easy to meet the withdrawal requirements. Also, each of these 2 sites have their own additional promotions from time to time, for example HoldemPoker was having an August 19, 2006 freeroll tournament which sends a player to the 2007 World Series of Poker. The only requirement for that was a minimum deposit using the deposit code "WSOP2007".
Also, every day at 5:00 PM ET, there is a $2.00 buy-in $4,000 frenzy tournament with rebuys and add-ons at any of the Ongame Network sites mentioned above. Play in as many of these as you can, but play them as though they were freezeouts instead of rebuy & add-on tournaments. Allow yourself to take a rebuy only if it's shortly after you've started. You will win some big pots from the rebuy fanatics who will often go all in with marginal cards, hoping to build a big stack. Play that way if you want, but my recommendation is to play even tighter than normal, and when you catch a monster, such as AA, KK, QQ, or AK, that's when you might consider calling an all in bet for an easy double-up. Try to survive until after the rebuy period is over, then play your best poker during the freezeout period. Build up a bankroll of at least $50 at Pokerroom, EuroPoker, or HoldemPoker, or any of the others in Steps 1 - 3, then move on to Step 5!
In Step 5, I write about the very best online poker sites you need to join if you've gotten to the magic $50 bankroll at more than one site. Let me know how you're doing with it by emailing me at paul@vegastexasholdem.net.