Americas Cardroom Freeroll Leaderboards

I took a closer look at the Americas Cardroom leaderboard promotion and it might be worth pursuing. Of course it's not easy to finish in the top ten of any kind of tournament, even a freerool, when it can have between 500 and 1,000 players.

I've been playing some of these, noting how the players play in general and I think that I'm getting the hang of it.  I started out crashing and burning in the first hour, then I was getting in the top quarter of the field.  Soon I was regularly getting in the top 100 of fields of 600 or 700 players.  In my last two I got knocked out around 50th place.

I took another look at the prizes and they are better than I thought.  The top 10 are decided by the number of points accumulated during the week..  Points are from 10 points for a first place, 9 points for second, down to 1 point for a 10th-place finish.  That means that I wouldn't have to win the whole thing to get some value from it.

The other interesting thing is that the prizes are better than I thought.  I thought that first place got a free ticket to a $215 tournament and that  everyone else got less than that, but it's a pretty good deal even for the players who finish in places two through ten.

First place wins a ticket to play a $215 tournament and a ticket for a $55 tournament.  Places 2 through 10 get a $55 ticket.  If the $55 tournament has more than 100 players (I think it would be a lot more) that's a prize pool of over $5,000,

I have no idea how hard it would be to crack the top 10 of the leaderboard.  The whole thing might not even be feasible for one reason or another.  I would certainly have to put in a lot of volume.  A freeroll goes off every hour and I would have to play as many as possible. to have any kind of a shot.

Two things would have to happen for me to have a decent shot:

1. I would have to have a completely clear schedule, pretty much doing nothing but eating, sleeping and playing poker for a week.

2. No studying during a freeroll week, only playing.

Number one is tricky.  I would have to pick a week with a decent weather forecast so that I didn't spend an hour or more every day dealing with all of the snow.  And there is always the Available Guy issue lurking out there.

As far as number two, I always want to spend at least 25% of my weekly poker time studying, but that's easy enough to work out.  If I had a no-study week I could balance it with 50% study the next week.  Maybe my leaderboard could be once a week, or just occasionally when I could clear the time. I really won't know exactly how this might work until I dig into it a little more, by playing more of them and by looking up some information online on how these leaderboards play out, whether the same players usually in the top ten, etc.

I'm not sure if I'm going to do this or not, and it might not happen for  a couple weeks or maybe three months from now.  I might not do it at all. I have no idea how many players are trying to get to the top of the leaderboard.  It could be a hundred or a thousand.

I will report back with my findings.