PokerStars has released the schedule for the 2017 Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP), one that promises to be the poker room’s most ambitious yet. Last year’s SCOOP broke all sorts of PokerStars records, but this one will be a week longer, and have $55 million in guaranteed prize pools, $15 million more than the 2016 version. It will have the usual SCOOP schedule format, with events running in triplicate with three separate buy-ins for each. All told, there are 57 events on the schedule, which means there are 171 total tournaments.
The extra week is at the beginning of the SCOOP scheduled, reserved for “phased” tournaments. The way these week is there are multiple starting flights spread across several days (a week, in this case). Each flight lasts the same amount of time. Later in the poker festival, the survivors from all those flights return to continue the tournament. It’s a way to give people a chance to play in a huge tourney was big prize pools, but not have to commit to playing for a day or two straight.
One interesting game type making its SCOOP debut is “Win the Button,” which first showed up in last year’s WCOOP. There will be both No-Limit Hold’em and No-Limit Omaha versions of the event. In Win the Button, the player who wins the hand gets the button on the next hand, thus the name makes perfect sense. These tourneys tend to feature more aggressive play, as the reward for winning a hand is much greater than normal.
There are also a number of Progressive Knockout tournaments on the schedule. In these, half the buy-in is put into the prize pool, while half is used as a bounty on each player’s head. Instead of winning a player’s entire bounty when knocking them out, though, you only get half of it, while the other half is added to your own bounty.
And then there is the one event that is the Progressive 100% Knockout. In this one, ALL of the buy-in is used as bounty. The only way to win money is to eliminate other players.
As mentioned, the 2016 SCOOP destroyed records. With nearly $91 million prize pools (168 total tourneys), it set the mark for the largest combined prize pool for an online tournament series in poker history.
The three Main Events all set records themselves, as well:
• 2016 SCOOP $10,000 High Main Event: 824 players, $8,000,001.76 prize pool (previous record 694 players, $6,940,000 prize pool in 2015 SCOOP)
• 2016 SCOOP $1,000 Mid Main Event: 5,026 players, $4,786,661.88 prize pool (previous record 4,238 players, $4,238,000 prize pool in 2015 SCOOP)
• 2016 SCOOP $100 Low Main Event: 24,591 players, $2,255,978.34 prize pool (previous record 23,045 players, $2,304,500 prize pool in 2013 SCOOP)
