Another reason to stay home
The PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) is only just winding down today, but the poker room has already announced its next online tournament series, the Summer Series. No rest for the weary.
The Summer Series will run June 7-21 at will feature 151 tournaments with $25 million in guaranteed prize pools. It shouldn’t be difficult for most people who want to participate to do so, as there will be at least eight events held per day. They are also spread out throughout the day, with the earliest events beginning in the 10:00am ET hour and the latest starting between 5:00pm ET and 6:30pm ET.
Buy-ins start at $11, so while it’s not, as PokerStars puts it, “a series for the typical micro-stakes player,” it is still quite affordable for plenty of people to play in at least a tournament or two. And of course, since it’s both PokerStars and online poker, you can expect to see plenty of satellites running around the clock.
Summer Series highlights
There is a pair of Main Events, each the same, but with different price points. The $55 buy-in Summer Series Main Event will have a $1 million guarantee, while the hefty $530 buy-in will have a $2 million guarantee. Both are Progressive KO events, which are getting more and more popular.
In a Progressive KO, half the buy-in is allocated to the prize pool and half is used a bounty on each player. If a player knocks someone out (hence the “KO” part of the name), the winner of the hand receives half of the victim’s bounty as a cash award, while the other half is added to their own bounty. Thus, players who eliminate many opponents become more attractive targets in their own right. Progressive KO tourneys encourage action and discourage people from trying to squeak into the money.
Two Special Edition Sunday Millions events, one on June 17 and one on June 14, will also have seven-figure guarantees. Both will have prize pools of at least $1.5 million.
As one would expect with most online tournament series, the schedule is composed mostly of Hold’em tournaments, but there are variations within that like the aforementioned Progressive KO, along with different blind speeds and table capacities. Omaha fans will also have plenty of events from which to choose.
SCOOP broke records
As mentioned, today is the final day of PokerStars’ SCOOP as 11 tournaments are still ongoing. June 1 marks the end of the tournament series with the highest total guaranteed prize pools in online poker history. After adding 132 tournaments and $50 million in guarantees to take the total guarantees up to $135 million, SCOOP broke the record that had just been set at $100 million by the WSOP Super Circuit Online Series on GGPoker.
PokerStars had originally set the total guarantees of SCOOP at $85 million, but a combination of success and likely competitiveness saw it extend the series just before it was set to end in mid-May.
