Hello Everyone!

A little bit regarding me:

I am 34 years old, married, father of 1,5 years old sweet boy and father of 2 dogs! I was born, raised, studied and worked in Turkey before I have decided to move Germany beginning of 2019. Poker is always a hobby for me and I try to play it whenever I have some spare time. For the future, I do not have any intention to change this and it can remain as my hobby until I retire from business world.

I enjoy MTT’s more than cash games and I mostly play them in my free time. %99 I am playing online as I don’t have much time for live tournaments. Played few live tournaments before in Malta, Holland, Germany, Spain and Czechia. Had also chance to play few cash games in South Africa and Playground in Canada. I never had a year with huge amount of game volume. I think I played so far average 400-500 tournaments each year. So I was never been actual grinder and I do not have such intention to be one in future.

What is poker for me?

I never see poker as a source of income before, today it is same and future it will be also like this. I love the game and if I win some money, it will go back to tables by trying to beat higher buy-in ranges. I do not expect any income from Poker as I already have happy life and it is enough for me and for my family. For future, I also do not have the motivation of going professional and making hundred thousands of dollars from Poker. I better give my main focus on real life business as I can make it happen faster than Poker.

I find out its motivating me more by having such challenges and trying to achieve goals. Until this day my average buy-in is around 15-20$. Time to time I play 55$ - 109$ tournaments mostly festivals such as SCOOP/WCOOP or Sunday Million. Last summer I have busted 15th on Sunday million, it was almost a final table as I lost AK <88<QQ 3-way preflop all-in with 45BB pot. Also got some SCOOP / WCOOP day 2’s and deep runs but never been on any final table on those festivals. I think my biggest online score was something around 2500$-3000$. Biggest live tournament score was 11.000€.

Why such goal?

Well I asked myself if I win today 100.000$ from Poker what will change in my life? And to be honest I will have %100 same life and it will not change anything. Probably I will just need to find a way to invest this money just to protect its own value and that’s all. Therefore, such goal is not motivating me enough to play.

Today I have the possibility to start with 10.000$ bankroll and try it out and in worst case I will lose this money which will again not affect anything in my life. So to be honest there is not enough entertaining value here for me. That's why I have decided to see the possibility of grinding Poker in 2023 starting with $0 balance. If I can achieve any success, maybe this can also motivate other people! In addition, we can find the answer that if such goal is still possible for a recreational player or not. So welcome all to my little experiment

What to expect / What not to expect:

This is not a sprint challenge. So dont expect 50 tournaments every day or 5000+ tournaments each year. I am a husband, father, business owner, expat and got many responsibilities out of Poker. To be honest I am same as majority of any person in Poker community right now. Therefore, I believe I am not any different than many of you. With this challenge we will find out together with $0 bankroll how far we can go in 2023 and how much time needs to be invested. But main goal here is to have fun! If I feel any point its not fun for me anymore i would pause or quit the challenge. Main difficulty of such challenge will be never be regarding money but more being patient and keep the mental level steady.

Now I will work on the steps and game plan of this challenge and post it here soon! Keep in touch!

Starting Bankroll: $0

So the plan is to share your account with others then. Makes sense being a daddy after all.

Step I: $0 to $100



To achieve this is very possible if I can find enough freerolls to play. Poker world is not like before, as networks are not offering many freerolls without any prerequisite anymore. This might look like the easiest part of the challenge but actually, it is one of the hardest part to achieve. It took 9 months for Chris Ferguson back in 2006 to achieve this even though he can find those days many freerolls to play. So, I don’t expect this to happen in one week. Let’s try to sustain our patience and it will be enough! My only fear is not finding enough games to play. To prevent this I will try to grind freerolls in different networks and see if I can find enough games by mixing them.


Gameplan:

I have 4 possible networks to play and here you go the plan:

• PokerStars:

The main network I played from 2019 till today. To be honest there is not a huge possibility to play with 0$ here. However, there are few freerolls, which need password to play. I will check those tournaments and see what I need to do to get those passwords. Some of them require a deposit; some of them require registering PokerStars over them. Those will not be options for us. I will play if there are some freerolls which I can directly register. Also, I saw there are some freerolls which gives tickets to satelites. I can maybe try those but to make money out of them I need to win the freeroll, then win the satellite, then make into the money in the main tournament. So, it doesn’t seem a very smooth solution to make a few bucks.

• GG Poker:

I don’t see any freeroll on this network. But I found out that you can get everyday a ticket called “freebie” where you can play 1x 0.25$ games. So, I will log-in here once every day to see if there will be possibility to grind some bucks with such method.

• Party Poker:

I recently found out they have started a promotion of Round the Clock freeroll tournaments without any prerequisite. There is one tournament each hour where prize pools differ from 50$ - 200$. This is huge for us. First, congratulations Party Poker! This must be the spirit that all poker rooms follow! These poker rooms are making millions and millions, so at least they can give such a small percentage back to the community. Freerolls are fun and it will always be good to draw players that are new to poker. I feel like this will be our main source of making first $$ from freerolls.

• 888 Poker:

There are some freerolls running but most of them require deposit or some challenges to be completed. These are not options for us as we can’t deposit and we can’t either complete challenges with 0$ in our account. If there are freerolls without prerequisite, we will of course play them. I think also once every day you can spin a wheel and get some tickets. I will spin this wheel every day to see the possibility of winning some tickets.


Our weekly schedule will be as follow:
Monday to Friday when I have the possibility, I can play starting from 18:00-19:00
Saturday and Sundays are bit flexible and can play more.

To summarize our game plan; I will grind those round of the clock freeroll tournaments on Party Poker.
GG Poker and 888 Poker I will log once every day to spin that wheel and use daily freebies.
PokerStars if I have password I can play few tournaments there too, also maybe can try satellite freerolls.

If you guys have some other suggestions for me please feel free to share! Every little will help us on this road

I will update this post sometimes every day, sometimes once a week.
Let’s GO!!!

I started from freerolls back in the day, but clearly the opportunity is much different these days. GL!

I started with $0 on SWC with a target to get to 10k chips, about $600 at that time. took almost a year to make it. They have lots of freerolls but only for like 50c prize pools. Nice thing is there are lots of different games there and the freerolls cycle through each game.

Cheers
True! I am curious about the possibility to grind from $0 in 2023
If there is enough freerolls its possible for sure, question is how much time it will take to grind it up to $100. That we will see!



Partypoker freerolls are currently paying 10-15$ for first place. But player pool is around 2000+
So its not easy to ship one.

What is bothering me with most freerolls are that you start very short with hyper blind levels. So its more of luck than skill. So I am hoping to make a lucky start to be able to play some MTT's for real $.

I am not going to grind 100$ just from freerolls. Once we made few bucks i will try $1 - $2 MTT's and hope shipping them to be able to boost the bankroll fast.

Lets see! I will start the challenge this week friday or saturday. I will update this post soon!

I like the idea and will keep track of your progress. Good luck!

if you are purely looking for freerolls and can play on ACR, they have a lot of totally free tournaments with 50$ prizepool (sometimes 6max, sometimes plo, so you can pick which ones to play). Ive only won a few cents but Im sure if you play well and a lot of them you can make some starting cash

You have a cool style of writing. Good luck with your challenge, all the best from Bremen.

Cheers mate! Welcome..

Thanks for the suggestion! Not sure if you can play on ACR from Germany. Maybe a German fella can confirm if its possible or not.


Cheers mate
It's a small world.. I am also writing this post from Bremen

Good luck. I look forward to watching how you get on.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I started the challenge 1st of April!

I got $1 Spin & Gold ticket from daily Freebie on GG Poker and used it on 6-max Spin & Go.
6-max first two positions are paid and 3-max only 1st position paid. Thats why I want to used this ticket on 6-max as I saw the chance bit higher to cash even its 1/3 probability on both.
We won it



I have grinded some Round The Clock Freerolls on Party Poker. Got 2 cashes!
17 out of 1979 for $1.10
255 out of 2217 for $0.25

888 Poker we got some freeroll tickets from daily spins. No cashes there.
Played only 1 freeroll on PokerStars and no cash there either.

$1.35 balance on Partypoker we will use for 2x $0,55 tourney or 1x $1,10 tourney
$4 balance on GGpoker we will use either on 4x $1 tournaments or maybe NL2

For tournaments i will go with slower blind structure to be able to decrease variance bit.

Its good start.. Lets keep it like this

Starting Bankroll: $0
Current Bankrol: $5.35

Have you looked into ACR, there are sometime Streamer freerolls with a big GTD, as well as a bounty if you knock out the streamer.
I played one with a Hearthstone streamer, where 1st place was 1k and a knockout was worth 1k as well.

Cheers mate


Thanks for the advice. I didnt checked ACR yet but its an option!
Partypoker round the clock freerolls are giving me chance to have enough sample size. In case I feel like there arent enough freerolls, I can maybe add ACR.
My plan here is to play $0.55 - $1.10 tournaments with the cashes i have from freerolls. So i am hoping to boost bankroll with those micro tournaments as fast as possible to be able to stop with freerolls.

Yesterday was the second day and it was not so bad.

I started with GG Poker freebie which was $0.25 ticket to a 32 player Sit & Go.
I was 4th out of 32 and cashed $0.63.

Party Poker got 2 cashes from freerolls:
8 out of 1474 > $1.10
376 out of 2613 > $0.25

I tried 2x $0.55 tourneys here but unfortunately no ITM.

888 Poker I cashed $0.20 in 5952 player freeroll. To be honest I dont like the format of this tournament as blinds increase every minute. Structure of Party Poker freerolls are much more realistic if you can play short stack strategy good.


I am optimistic with Party Poker freerolls. So far I have %25 ITM here. I can play many of these every week as new tournament starts every hour. So with those cashes I will immediately make investment into $0.55 - $1.10 tournaments and hope to cash big in one of those!

Starting Bankroll: $5.35
Current Bankroll: $6.43

Today I dont have much time to play enough tourneys.

As before we started with GG Poker freebie which was $0.25 Sit & Go ticket. I used it on 6 max Sit & Go
I won it and got $1 as prize. 3 out of 3 cash so far with these freebies. Lets keep this!

Played 4x freerolls on Party Poker and cashed 3 of them. Total $0.75

No time today to play any $0.55 or $1.10 tourneys.
So far so good! 3 game days and cashed on all of them.

I will be on short holiday till next Monday! Next update will be next week

Starting Bankroll: $6.43
Current Bankroll: $8.18

Hey! I am back
I was on short holiday and now back to grind! Little update before we start!

Last action was from 3rd of April and after that I only logged daily to GG Poker for freebies.
I got 1st out of 30 players on $0.25 freebie.



Yesterday I played bit NL2 with balance on GG Poker. Got some bad beats but finished day with ~$2 profit.



Because of our suckouts/coolers GG Poker gave us ticket to Flipout tournament which happened today.

I was lucky and managed to cash it
This is very nice boost to my bankroll!



Game plan is now to grind bit NL2 on GG Poker as I need to turn my $C to real $$$.
I have nice bankroll on GG Poker. So for now I am thinking of pausing freerolls on Party Poker and run some games on GG Poker instead.

Starting Bankroll: $/€ 8.18
Current Bankroll: $/€ 32.08

Lets continue!

These types of challenging are great to read. I'm glad you're making good progress and I hope it continues.

Thanks a lot!