Yes, you can!
Actually, there are two main ways to play for free at Juicy Stakes Poker! One is to play in our “play money” games. The other is to enter our many freeroll tournaments. Finally, since we have deposit bonus offers and low minimum buy-ins, there are many ways to “almost” play for free!
Play Money Allows Totally Free Poker Gaming
Players who choose to play in our Play Money games, do so for any number of reasons. The most common reason is that they know that they will play at low stakes when they go from playing for play money to playing for real money. They want to get the experience they know they need before taking the plunge into playing for real money, however small the stakes will be!
We offer Play Money games for exactly this reason. This is the poker equivalent of online casinos offering unlimited free play! The idea is simply that we should allow players to learn at their leisure and individual time schedule the poker variation or variations that they will ultimately play for real money here at Juicy Stakes.
It is true that we can afford to make this generous offer since we pay our bills by taking a very small rake from almost every pot. The only time we don’t take a rake is when all players folded to the Big Blind before the flop. It is one of the amazing aspects of being located in cyberspace that gives us the freedom to allow thousands of players to play in Play Money games.
How Low are Low Stakes Games?
We offer games with blinds as low as one and two cents! If you are a true beginner at online poker, then you would likely be quite amazed at how popular online poker is! In a world with so many opportunities to play poker, we find that we can run games with super low blinds alongside games with very large blinds and every stake in between!
Starting Out at Low to No Stakes is the Best Way to Learn
A lot of players here at Juicy Stakes who play for moderate to high stakes started out playing in Play Money games! It is simply one of the best ways to learn how to play poker for real.
Friday Night Poker with Pals is Fun But…
It isn’t “for real”. In the sense that you play for real money with your friends, these games are real, but in the sense that it is highly unlikely that your Friday night poker pals know much about poker strategy and nuances such as poker math, these games are not real.
In order to get to a level that would allow you to win money playing poker, you need to play against players who have at the very least read a book or two about poker. One might think that the Play Money games are for players who have not read any poker books nor intend to do so. There are, to be sure, some players like that but most of the Play Money players are serious about getting to the point that will allow them to compete in real money games.
We Offer Freeroll Tournaments
The value of freeroll tournaments is that tournaments present players with a different type of poker experience. In the Play Money games, if your “money” drops to almost zero, you simply ask the house to give you more money! It’s play money in any case so there is no problem to the house or to the other players that a player gets “more money”!
Tournaments are basically elimination games. In a tournament in which players begin with, for example, “$1000” in chips, if and when those chips are lost, the player is eliminated from the tournament. This is not a big deal in any case since we offer many tournaments every day some of which are freeroll tournaments.
The elimination element changes the dynamic of the game entirely.
The prize money in any freeroll tournament is very small; it is basically symbolic that a player “won” that tournament.
A lot of players prefer the freeroll tournaments over the Play Money games because the tournaments are elimination games. That means that they have to be better today than yesterday in evaluating hands and in doing all of the small, subtle things they will need to do when they “graduate” to real money games.
In other words, Play Money games are “just games” while freeroll tournaments have the sense of being more “real”.
Poker is a Massively Challenging Game
Sometimes poker is compared to chess or GO as a game of skill. Both chess and GO are amazing games of skill but they have one thing in common with each other that poker does not share with them. That is, that in chess and GO, the two players see everything on the board. The more skilled player will “see” more deeply into a position and will usually make the best moves to win the game.
Poker always has hidden cards. That means that even the best analysis of a hand might fail if the opponent has “pocket sixes or pocket fours” as in the famous Daniel Negreanu YouTube clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSfd-8ZteHw - 7:20 to 9:20). The hidden cards also affect the hand if an opponent plays the hand so poorly that he or she wins by sheer luck or if everyone plays the hand “correctly” and pure luck ultimately determines the winner of that hand.
Since poker is so challenging, it is a very good thing that we offer both Play Money games and freeroll tournaments.
You Can Play Almost for Free
The minimum buy-in for many tournaments is so small that it amounts to being “practically” free! We run many promotions of tournaments every day with very low buy-ins!
Some people overestimate the luck element in poker and say that it is really all about luck. It is also possible to underestimate the element of luck. Playing for free gives players the monetary freedom to learn the many subtleties of poker at no cost!
Join Juicy Stakes Poker
We feel that this article points the way to great poker play online! After all, we have just explained how you can improve your poker play at no cost! So, if you are not yet a member of the “family”, may we urge you to JOIN JUICY STAKES POKER NOW?
