AGreen,
I did a few things to qualify.
Firstly, I played stage qualifiers on pokerroom.com and
paradise poker. I didn't really get anywhere.
Then I saw the you get 10 million from
full tilt if you qualify through them and win. I thought that was definitely the ticket even though winning seemed extremely improbable.
I played the freeroll in which they gave away 40 seats to people and you qualified for the freeroll by getting 10k
full tilt points (I think they give fewer points now per dollar rake). I didn't win in this one.
I did have 10k points so I played the qualifier to 26 dollar ticket event. I placed in maybe 1/3 of these (whole final table of the event got a ticket).
I then played in some 26 dollar token events that qualified you to a 76 dollar feeder to the WSOP event.
I played 3 of those 76 dollar events, qualifying in two of them.
I then played 2 of the 216 events. The first one I got like 8th and you needed 6th to get paid anything, 4th for a package.
The second one I qualified. I had a pretty good run of cards and outplayed a guy with a big stack in the middle of the tournament which helped a ton, basically tripling my stack through him and it wasn't so bad before.
So, I did it in the cheapest freerolls you could do it, but it's not really appropriate to say my ticket cost me nothing because I lost money on
full tilt making the points (people there weren't folding top pair ok kicker ever causing me trouble with my very aggressive style at the time), probably 400 dollars and did a few hundred dollars of events on other sites as well.
I also qualified on July 3rd, the last possible day to qualify and the seminar was in Vegas on the 6th, first day of main event on the 7th so I had to quickly get myself down there.
It was pretty cool to win then because I'd all but given up on making it to the WSOP main event for that year, and maybe forever.
I busted out first day at like 11 p.m. after some 11 1/2 hours of play. Same day as Doyle and James Woods busted out, but after them. :P
There were many mediocre players. At the time I was a decent player and a little above average both in performance (outlasted 2/3 of the competition) and my estimation. No money, good experience.