A couple of years ago, the 2000 World Series of Poker champion Chris Ferguson embarked on a challenge to turn $0 into $10,000. He managed to achieve this by starting in freeroll tournaments and he eventually cashed in one of them for $50 if I remember correctly. He then fragmented his new bankroll and played micro-stakes no-limit hold’em.

You can play stakes as little as one cent and two cent in online poker games these days so he was never in any real danger of going bust. The key to doing something like this is to initially have the patience and the discipline to play countless freeroll tournaments until you eventually cash in one of them.

Of course some people would say that you could eventually get to $10,000 from $0 merely playing freeroll tournaments all over the Internet. This is true but I would hazard a very educated guess that the process would take far longer than it would by switching to cash games after you had cashed in one of them.

After your patience and discipline have been rewarded by cashing in a freeroll tournament then you will need cast iron money management guidelines in place. Although it has to be said that you could be waiting months for your big breakthrough as freeroll tournaments tend to be populated by an awful lot of players.

If I recall, it took Chris Ferguson more than six months before he cashed in a freeroll although I am sure that someone with more time on their hands and who were prepared to play more tournaments could speed up this process by quite some way. As I have written previously, I was earning $25/hour multi-tabling NL50 as part of my challenge so once you hit the NL25 level then it should be plain sailing.

I do recall Chris Ferguson saying that he would have liked to have continued to $1 million but that would be more problematical. The issue with trying to take it to $1 million in online poker is that you would have to play against far better players and the value would be substantially less in many poker games.

At a rate of $25/hour then I suppose that I could have turned $0 into $1 million but it would have taken me around 20 years to do it working 40 hours a week. That is simply not something that I would wish to do as that would mean essentially working for $50k a year. However the option to play NL100 and then NL200 could speed up this process but this is countered by the fact that these are decent levels these days and substantially tougher to beat than NL50.

Although I have ghosted these games recently on www.bwin.com and the overall level isn’t that tough. However the fact of the matter is that Chris Ferguson showed the poker world how to turn fresh air into a five figure sum of money using not much more than discipline and good solid bankroll management.

The discipline to move up and down the levels when things are going well and badly accordingly is the key. Good bankroll management will turn mediocre poker players into winning poker players and winning poker players into very successful poker players.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson