Private freeroll passwords
by ~ February 26th, 2009. Filed under: Micro level poker.
* Modified March 6th, 2009 *
What a nuisance some things become.
Let’s start with a definition. A poker freeroll is a tournament with no entry fee. It’s different from play money in that it doesn’t even cost play money to enter, plus the prizes are real money or entries to other tournaments. Sometimes all you need is an account at the site and you’re eligible to play.
All poker sites that I know of have freerolls. Full Tilt has ones with a maximum of 2,700 players competing for a total of $100 split amongst the top finishers. These run 3 or 4 times a day, but registration fills up in less than a minute. They also have daily country freerolls, based apparently on your current location and not your home. I discovered this while traveling trying to register for one and wasn’t allowed to register because I wasn’t physically in that country.
There are all kinds of other freerolls as well. Freerolls that don’t cost money but cost player points that you earn by playing real money games. On PokerStars I recently won another FPP freeroll where it costs 210 FPPs (frequent player points) to enter, but the top 6 of 20 entries get a seat in a $10+1 tournament. Then I unregistered for the tournament and I received $11 of “tournament dollars” that I can use towards entry in any of tournament that PokerStars runs. These type of freerolls are rewards for site members, and some can have large prizes for the high status/high rollers.
But the best payout freerolls for people with no money in their account are the ones that are setup by private groups. Best because the total prize payout is often higher, plus there are fewer participants. Fewer because the tournament is password protected and designed to be available only to selected members of the group.
So there’s the background.
There’s even a term, “freeroll whores“, for those that have a high priority of finding and playing freerolls. And it’s some of these freeroll whores, though definitely not all or even most, that are causing the nuisance. Outside groups such as poker forums that put together these freerolls have their legitimate players harassed for the passwords, either at the tables or via private communication. And the groups are becoming annoyed at the number of password thieves that are getting into these private freerolls.
The groups are resorting to all kinds of tactics, from not making the password available until a couple hours prior, to emailing only the passwords, to hiding the passwords from the general public and making people meet requirements in order to see the page with the password. In many cases investigations are undertaken by numbers of the legitimate players to find out who leaked the password so that the guilty party can be banned from access to future passwords. Some people really get a burr under their saddle when people think people are stealing from them.
Poker sites apparently don’t care. Complaints made to them about players who should not be allowed to participate fall on deaf ears as the sites say simply that it is the tournament organiser’s responsibility to keep the passwords private. I don’t know if the same applies for Intellipoker, which is a forum run by PokerStars in German. They probably hold a little more sway with PokerStars that any other forum does, and Full Tilt has it’s own forum within it’s web site as well.
On one hand I guess that someone that has eligibility for playing a private freeroll might see it as something that has no cost to them, even though they earned it by meeting whatever the eligibility requirements might be. And if their friend wins money, good for them.
But people will even give the passwords to people that they barely know. if you’re planning to play the freeroll, why would you allow people that you don’t know to have a chance to beat you, or to thin out the payout structure so that when if you win, you win less? Plus you’re risking being cut off from future access to the freerolls. Just tell them thanks, but no thanks, or better yet just ignore them.
I wonder how many of the password thieves are underage and that’s the reason why they can’t make a $10 deposit to start playing. And some probably get some kind of “underground” thrill from it, getting something of value that they didn’t earn legitimately, but that’s kinda pathetic when compared to real hackers or phishers.
