How to play poker for free

Many new beginning poker players are wary of sitting down at a casino or depositing cash in an online poker site before they develop more experience. Lucky for them, there's almost never been a better time to find players to play and learn poker for free. Whether you're interesting in cash games or tournaments, limit or no-limit pokers, there are plenty of options for getting your feet wet without risking your wallet.

Here are six places to get started:

#1. Poker in the Pub

Pub poker is a great way to play for free.
Photo Credit: Flickr/Arkadyevna

Pub poker is one of the easiest and most entertaining ways to get a feel for tournament poker. In most cities and states, you can find bars and pubs that feature weekly or nightly hold'em tournaments. These events are legal because they players enter for free and compete for prizes rather than cash. It's a win-win proposition: bars attract paying, drinking customers on their slower nights; players get their poker fix for the price of a few drinks. Many pubs offer two tournaments a night, so you can try again if you bust out of the first one. Many of these pub poker nights are part of bigger leagues that offer regional and national competitions for the best players. A few years ago, the Washington Post ran a feature by Hetty Lipscomb about what to expect at a pub poker night.

To find a poker pub night near you, check out any of these sites:

• NPPL poker (CO, FL, GA, IN, NJ, NY, PA, TX, VA)
• World Tavern Poker (10+ States, including DC-MD-VA)
• barpoker.com (FL, MO)
• Kings and Queens Pub Poker (VA)
• Pub Poker Championship (FL, NC)
• Players Pub Poker (NJ, PA)

For locals in D.C., here's where you can play pub poker tournaments

• Asylum (DC, Monday 7 & 10)
• Champions Billiards (Arlington, Monday 7 & 10pm)
• Clarendon Grill (Arlington, Tuesday 7pm)
• Fast Eddie's (Springield, Monday 7 & 10pm,)
• Hard Times Cafe (Fairfax, Monday 4pm & 8pm; Satuday 12pm & 4pm)
• Little Italy (Annandale, Thursday 7 &10pm)
• Pepi's Pizza Box (Alexandria, Tuesday 7 & 10pm)
• Sully's (Chantilly, Wednesday 7:00 & 10:00; Saturdays and Sundays, 3pm & 6pm)

I've played in a bunch of these and they're fun. To me, live poker is always better than online poker: it's a social, human game, so it's more interesting when you can look across the table and see the face of the person who you're trying to beat. Some pub players take the game seriously, but most are just there to have a good time and drink.

#2. Freerolls on Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker

Freeroll Tournaments on PokerStars

Two of the biggest online poker rooms, Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker both offer a wide range of both play-money ring games and tournaments, as well as freerolls for real-money players. You can try your hand a huge tournaments with thousands of players or take on a smaller field at a five- or nine-table tournament.

Freerolls often don't offer cash prizes, but do provide a number of winners with free entry into an actual live tournament. You if you do well enough, you can win your way into a bigger real moneytournament . The odds of winning a freeroll aren't great: free poker tounraments attract huge fields of players. Then again, what do you have to lose?

If you're willing to go a little beyond free, Poker Stars has a ton of sit-and-go's and tournaments for $1 buy-ins, 24 hours a day. They even have some tournaments you can buy-in for with for $0.25 or $0.10... For example, they offer a 90-player, $0.25 tournament. The prize pool isn't huge, but your quarter could turn into $6.20 if you won the entire thing.

If you're interested in cash games, rather than tournaments, Stars has cash games with one penny/two penny blinds. Good luck finding that in Vegas...

#3. Facebook Poker

Free Texas Hold'em on Facebook

If you've got a Facebook account, you're a click away from one of the biggest free poker communities on the web. The biggest poker app on Facebook boasts over 12 million "monthly active users." The games are often very social and chatty, but there's still poker to be played, and you can challenge friends to join you online.

Most of the competition on Facebook isn't very serious or focused (it mostly seems to be people wasting time at work or trying to prograstiate from doing other work). Still, it can still be a challenge to build up your bankroll and learn how to beat loose opponents.

You can also check out the profiles of your opponents while you're playing. If nothing else, Facebook Poker is a fun distraction.

#4: AOL Poker

AOL Poker: Better than you'd think

AOL offers a surprisingly wide range of free poker games online: No-Limit Hold'em, Omaha, Five Card Draw, Seven Card Stud, Three-Card Poker. They also offer free poker tournaments. You don't need to be an AOL susbscriber to play. The interface is polished and smooth, and easy to use. I tried this out for a few sessions and found it pretty solid and playable. The level of play is pretty horrible, though, even for free poker. Wait to flop a big hand and you're bound to get paid off. Try to bluff and you'll almost always get called by someone with third pair or second pair with a weak kicker. Despite the poor level of play, its still entertaining, free, and accessible from almost anywhere. Just like with Facebook poker, it's still a challenge to try and beat the loose competition and build up a bankroll.

#5. Yahoo Poker

Yahoo Poker: you get what you pay for

Yahoo Poker works, which is about as good of a thing as I can say about this game. Compared with Facebook or AOL poker, it looks somewhat clunky, as if the game was written in 2002. It also only offers limit poker, which is also pretty dated and stale.

Still, Yahoo Poker an option for players who don't use Facebook or want to set up a free AOL account. If you've already got a Yahoo account, you're a click away from playing. And despite the game's generally crappiness, for some reason there are always a ton of people playing Yahoo online games, so you're almost always going to be able to find someone here to play a bit of free online poker. That said, as far as free poker goes, Yahoo poker is about as weak as it gets. You get what you pay for, barely...

#6. Poker Academy*

Poker Academy: (almost) a free education

Poker Academy isn't free (*but the demo is). Off the shelf, it's actually $85, though you can find it a lot cheaper on eBay. Poker Academy is an application that goes way beyond your typical desktop poker game. You can simulate cash games, sit-and-go's, or large-field tournaments, limit or no-limit, and you can set up the types of opponents you want to practice against (loose? wild? tight? calling stations?) And unlike many poker games you can get for your phone or ipod, the artificial intelligence in the game is realistic and challenging.

There are three great things about Poker Academy, though, that make it a great option for beginners:

1. You can get in 200+ hands an hour. Once you fold a hand in Poker Academy, you can skip to the next one, speeding up the game in a way you could never do online or in a casino. Its a great way to put yourself in a lot of different situations and try out your decisionmaking.
2. The game keeps a history and statistics of all your hands, which you can go back and study. So you can play 2000 hands of no-limit holdem, then see which hands cost you the most money, or which hands were most profitable. This is the kind of study that good online poker players do with their real-money results, but Poker Academy lets you simulate the action and study your tendencies before you've already learned how expensive playing Ace-Jack can be.
3. Unlike most of the free poker options I've listed, you don't need to be at a pub or online to play Poker Academy (although it also has online multiplayer options)

So there you have it: six ways to play and learn poker for free (or almost free).

Two general tips when it comes to playing free poker:

First, since players don't have much to lose, expect loose, wild play. You're not going to get much thoughful, careful poker when no one has real money on the line. So don't be surprised when people make weird bets and calls with very weak hands.

Second, don't bluff much. You don't need to. Since half the people at pub tourneys can't let go of any decent hand, you're better of finding a good spot with a strong hand and betting for value. Almost always, someone will pay you off.

All that said, you're playing with Monopoly money, so feel free to experiment with different playing styles and approaches to see what works for you.