is there such things as tournaments with play money where some of the winners receive real money, even its just a few pennies to start playing with?

basically, is it possible to turn play money into real money?

Yes, at least there were back when Poker Stars ran the Daniel Negreanu freerolls. I won $2.50 and have been playing micro games with it for several months, running it up past $30.00.

Theres the Hubble freeroll where you qualify for another weekly 2k freeroll if you last to the top 100 out of 12000 peep's.

Theres also 10FPP tourney's for $500, and a daily 50K tourney qualifier where the top 5 get free entry into the daily 50K and the 6th to 27th places receive $5.50. You have to be on top of it when they start to register, they can fill up pretty fast.