The PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) is underway, but there is one event on the schedule later this month in which the details have yet to be completed. The 57th and final event of the 2017 PokerStars SCOOP is the Players’ Choice event, where the game type is to be determined by – as you might guess – the players. To tally the votes, PokerStars has put up a public poll on its Facebook page.
There are four event candidates, each chosen by one of the members of Team PokerStars Pro Online: Jaime Staples, Mikhail Shalamov, Randy Lew, and Lex Veldhuis. Here are the options:
No-Limit Hold’em Progressive Knockout – in this type of tournament, half of the buy-in goes to the prize pool and the other half is used as a bounty on each player’s head. When you eliminate an opponent, you don’t get all of their bounty, but rather just half of it. The other half is added to your own bounty. Thus, eventually there will be players who will be gigantic targets.
Jamie Staples, the popular Twitch streamer who suggested the Progressive Knockout for SCOOP, said in a press release, “I believe Progressive Knockouts are the future of tournament poker. It adds a layer of complexity, and excitement that starts from the very beginning of the tournament.”
No-Limit Hold’em Six-Max Win the Button Turbo – fairly self-explanatory, in a Win the Button tournament, the player who wins the hand receives the button for the following hand. The button does not move around the table like normal.
“This format is great,” Mikhail Shalamov said, “even when you’re not in the hand you get to cheer for other people to win the pot so that you don’t have to post big blind.”
No-Limit Hold’em Six-Max Deep Stacks Turbo – Randy “nanonoko” Lew is the proponent of this one, saying “A lot of times in tournaments we don’t get the option of playing with deep stacks like in cash games, so I’d love to see more deeper stacked tournaments come into play.”
Six-Max Pot-Limit Omaha – hey, another six-max game (and the press release prefaced it with a NLHE designation, which is obviously just a copy/paste error).
“Pot Limit Omaha is a great game,” explained Lex Veldhuis. “There is a lot of depth to it. Even when you’re short stacked in tournaments there is a still a lot of room to play. Every street is an all-out war because people can represent so many different hands.”
Players can vote for their choice (players’ choice!) on Facebook by selecting one of four emoticons, representing each of the four games. To be honest, I feel kind of bad for Lex Veldhuis, as the “angry” emoticon is associated with his tourney.
Voting ends at noon ET on May 8th and the winner will be announced that same day. The event will have three buy-in levels: $11, $109, and $1,050.
