Tilting at Freerolls

Once a year PokerStars sets up a series of freeroll tournaments for poker bloggers. The World Blogger Championship of Online Poker (WBCOOP). This year prizes are tickets into the Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP), which is one of the biggest online poker tournament series with some pretty big prizes.

Gaining entry into the WBCOOP is pretty simple. You just need to have an active poker blog that has been online for over 2 months. You also need to display your registration code on your blog which includes a couple of links to PokerStars.

For no money you get 7 chances to win one of 272 SCOOP tickets totaling over $63k with some additional prizes thrown in for best live blogging and best tweeter.

Seven chances to grab a portion of over $63k worth of SCOOP tickets and all you have to do is post a link? Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, but apparently not to this guy.

I was expecting a better-run series from PokerStars. I'm not going to bother promoting them for the rest of the series, regardless of the extra value I could be giving up. I won't be seriously playing them. They're just too much time invested for not enough return.

I'm more upset at PokerStars for promising an interesting series and then getting us all to promote not only PokerStars, but their upcoming SCOOP... and then not delivering on all of our efforts.

I know this is a freeroll, but my time is not free. Every second I spent and still am spending typing, blogging, tweeting, etc., about this and playing in these is valuable time I'm giving up. My time is much, much more valuable.

One of the problems he has is with the pre-registration. Once you receive your ticket, you can register to all of the events, days in advance in some cases. Because of this, a fair amount of players sit out the whole tourney because they pre-registered and then either forgot or had other things to do.

So you're playing in a MTT freeroll with pretty decent prizes where a good portion of the less than 2k entrants are sitting out and that's a bad thing? Gimme a table full of players with VP$IP of 0 and Fold BB to Steal 100% any day.

He's also been complaining on Twitter, and as usual, PokerStars has been very open to his criticisms; as nuts as they sound to me. One other issue seems to be that one player knocked him and a few others out, then sat out. That's a pretty common thing in freerolls. People build up a stack they think will get them in the money and then move on to more profitable games.

It's true that everyone is helping to promote PokerStars, the WBCOOP and SCOOP but that's a small price to pay. It's not like the majority of blogs (mine is no exception) have so much traffic or such a high Google PageRank that a link is all that valuable.

Seriously dude, relax. Deals this good don't come by that often.