PokerStars’ SCOOP 2011 guarantees big bucks

Written by Charles Martese
Wednesday, 30 March 2011 14:51

PokerStars’ two-week Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) is back in 2011 with 38 events and 114 tournaments.

This year's Spring Championship of Online Poker will be featuring  events and tournaments with high, medium and low buy-ins providing $45million-worth of guaranteed prize pools.

Running from May 8-22, there will be no limit hold’em, limit hold’em, no limit Omaha, pot limit Omaha, Badugi and eight-game mix tournaments, while main event buy-ins have been set at $109, $1050, and $10,300 with respective guarantees of $1million, $3million, and $5million in payouts.

There will also be another nine seven-figure guarantee events at SCOOP, with the first day – Sunday, May 8 – including $2100, $215 and $22 six-player maximum tables for no limit tournaments that guarantee prize pools of $1million, $750,000 and $300,000 respectively.

Satellites have already begun, starting from just 25¢, so there’s a chance for even the small time players.

But it’s not just the big bucks that are on offer as event winners will also be given a gold Movado watch from the Swiss luxury company that features the PokerStars spade and words ‘SCOOP Champion’ on its face.

The popular SCOOP leaderboard returns with the Player of the Series picking up a handy little collection of prizes – including a trophy, a 2011 World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) main event entry, a 2012 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) package, and a European Poker Tour (EPT) Grand Final package, as well as a limited edition PokerStars chips set.

The runner-up won’t do too badly either, winning a ticket to the 2011 WCOOP main event, a PCA prize package for next year, and the PokerStars chips set.

Third place will also collect that WCOOP main event entry and the PokerStars chips set.

Meanwhile, Full Tilt Poker looks set to become the latest online poker giant to team up with a land-based casino – if a deal is struck with United States operator Station Casinos to form an Internet-related partnership.

This news comes only a few days after PokerStars – the biggest online poker room in the world – announced they are to team up with Wynn Resorts to create PokerStarsWynn.com, which could conceivably allow PokerStars to legally accept U.S. players.

Legalisation with the United States could still take years, but partnerships of this sort between land-based casinos and the online world is a sign that regulation could well be on the horizon.

Earlier this year, Gibraltar-based 888 teamed up with Caesars Entertainment, having been approved by the Nevada Gaming Control Board, with aim being to build up online gambling ventures within Europe.

The Alderney-registered Full Tilt – the Internet’s second biggest poker operator – recently announced the introduction of a new tournament, the Onyx Cup Series, which will run just ahead of the World Poker Tour (WPT) Championship with massive buy-ins of between $100,000 and $300,000.

The event will culminate in a Grand Final in Las Vegas on May 11, with the likelihood that one of the 18 Station Casino venues in Nevada will act as host, although this has not yet been confirmed.

Finally, PartyPoker has been named as the most visited poker site on the Internet.

PartyPoker was placed at No.1 by Alexa, which collects data on browsing behaviour and researches website traffic, therefore putting the Gibraltar-based poker room ahead of PKR, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars – which many industry observers believe to be more powerful websites.

An interesting statistic to emerge from Alexa’s research is that one of the biggest groups to visit PartyPoker is unmarried German men, who account for 22% of the site’s traffic.