One of the big reasons social casino game sites are so popular is that they are free to play. Ah yes, free. Don’t we all just love free stuff?

While you probably know about free social games, it might surprise you to find out that many online casino sites that offer real money gambling also have a lot of free games. Sure, they aren’t the focus of the sites, but you can still win some bonus dollars, or in the case of a poker freeroll tournament, some actual money.

One of the most common ways for a casino site to go free is to offer up free spins on special bonus wheels. PalaCasino.com, for example, offers a free bonus wheel that you can play every day. It’s a special slot machine that gives out bonuses with a super jackpot of $1 million in cash.

Every day you sign on, you get one free spin on the wheel. But, Pala offers up a constant stream of special deposit matches that give you multiple free spins. Their latest offer gave you 25 bonus spins for a $25 deposit.

ResortsCasino.com also offers daily free spins on a bonus wheel, which wins you entries into a weekly drawing where 1,100 players get $10 bonuses. MoheganSun.com offers the same free spins promotion, but awards 10 winners $50 and 100 winners $10 in bonus funds each week.

In another type of promotion, TropicanaCasino.com and VirginCasino.com offer free games where the object is to win free spins in the site’s real money slot games. By playing Tiki’s Catch of the Day or Search for the Phoenix, you’ll win special bonus markers (a shell on Tiki’s and an egg on Phoenix). At the end of the month, you cash them in for free slot spins.

PlaySugarHouse.com actually offers both of these free promotion types. When you first sign up on the site, you spin a wheel for a welcome bonus of $5, $10 or $15. Once you’re a member, you can play free bingo games on the site daily with participants splitting a bonus dollar prize pool. Basically, it’s a type of freeroll for bingo.

This brings us to the best free games on casino sites: poker freerolls.

A poker freeroll is just what it sounds like, a free-to-enter poker tournament where players can win real money. For example, WSOP.com offers up a daily $100 welcome freeroll for new players. Sign up and you’ll get seven tickets to the freeroll. The top 20 percent of winners split up the $100.

Other freerolls at the site are tied to your rewards level, but if you maintain a standing of “copper” or higher you could be invited to a $500 weekly freeroll.

BorgataPoker.com offers a great freeroll schedule with seven freerolls a day. They are low stakes–$10 to $50 prize pools—but still a great way to gain some low-risk experience. Borgata, however, goes big time with its monthly $2,500 freeroll. You can get an entry by earning 25 iRPs (loyalty points) in a month.

While these options are meant to offset the real-money games on their respective sites, they still give you a great opportunity to have some free-to-play fun while gearing up for the real action. And as we said, don’t we all just love free stuff?