Both websites announced a series of freeroll tournaments which will leave a lot of low-limit players filthy rich. Pokerstars will be sending 27 players to the Caribbean for free, guaranteeing at least $5,000 in cash each and guaranteeing that one of them will walk away with $1 million, all for just placing well in a few freeroll tournaments. PartyPoker’s promotion is arguably even more exciting. They are hosting a series of freeroll tournaments from now until June, 2007, which will end with six players traveling to South America to compete for their share of a gigantic, progressive prize pool.

Pokerstars’ Moneymaker Millionaire:
The Moneymaker Millionaire is a true freeroll. Pokerstars gives every player, including play money players, a free entry into one of its round one qualifiers. Once a player has used that entry, he or she can then buy in to all subsequent round one tournaments for 10 frequent player points.

Each player needs to complete three steps to qualify for the 27-player final at the Atlantis Resort and Casino in the Bahamas. The first step is ironically one of the most difficult. You have to place in the top 50 in one of the regularly scheduled round one freerolls. In the first two weeks of this promotion, the round one tournaments have averaged between 2,700 and 10,000 players entering, so that means you’ll need you’re A game to advance. You will be against some pretty bad players though, so a good player should be. The good news is once you make it through the first round, the second round is easy.

The second round tournament will be played by 1,200 players each Saturday until Dec. 2. The top 240-320 (depending on the week) players in that one move on to the round three final. Of course that’s the one I keep getting stuck on personally, but I guess that’s poker. Hopefully you’ll have better luck.

The round three tournaments are held on the first Sunday of each month. They will typically have a little over 1,000 players. One hundred and twenty players will walk away with at least $100 and the final 9 will win tournament entries and a free trip for two to Atlantis. The top five or six players will win a seat in the Moneymaker Millionaire final. The rest of the final table players will win a $12,000 Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure package.

I can’t emphasize enough how good of a promotion this is for low-limit players. Someone who’s never played for real money online before could win $1 million. Even if that doesn’t happen, someone who’s never played for real money before will probably win a trip at least.

Sign up to play in the Moneymaker Millionaire tournament at pokerstars. Remember, no real money deposit is required. It is completely free.

A strategy guide to the Moneymaker Millionaire freeroll series is coming soon.

The PartyPoker.com Monster:
PartyPoker is giving away $16.2 million of its own money in this thing, so you better believe I’m going to try to get a piece of it. In a way it’s hard to explain what the Monster is because there are so many parts to it. I’ve decided to list them all first and explain them afterward. The PartyPoker.com Monster is:

    * 32 weekly $100,000 freerolls
    * 8 monthly $1,000,000 freerolls
    * 8 offline freeroll tournaments the final table players of the monthly freerolls qualify for.
    * One Monster online final in May, 2007, which will have a prize pool containing $5 million of
        PartyPoker’s money and millions of dollars more that will be added as more players try to
        qualify for the freeroll series. From the way this promotion has taken off already, it looks like
        the final prize pool will be many times the $5 million PartyPoker is putting up. Some estimates
        have it as high as $50 million.

So how do you qualify? Well, like the Pokerstars promotion, this is a series of freerolls where everyone must start from the first level and work their way up. This one will require you to be a real money player, though. You have to qualify through either a single-table tournament, multi-table tournament, cash game jackpot hit, or by earning party points.

Sit-n-gos to this run around the clock, as do multi-table tournaments which award several of the top finishing players a seat into the weekly freeroll. Playing the cash game qualifiers is the same as playing the bad beat jackpot game, except a small portion of each pot goes toward the Monster prize pool.

I would recommend watching some of these cash games first and making sure you are comfortable with the rake structure before you play them. Personally, I think the tournaments are a better value.

Once you qualify for the weekly freeroll, you are competing for cash, but you also should try to finish in the top 2,000 to move on to the monthly million dollar freeroll. The same goes for the monthly freerolls. The top 1,000 in each of those tournaments wins a seat into the Monster grand final. Of those 8,000 players, six will win a trip to South America for the televised final. Obviously all six of them are going to be guaranteed a huge payday. Whoever finishes first is going to be extremely rich. We might be talking about eight figures here.

Sign up for the PartyPoker Monster Freeroll Series at PartyPoker.

A strategy guide for the Monster freeroll series is coming soon.