Play Online Poker

It’s that time of the year once again. PokerStars just announced the schedule for the 2010 PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) , starting the 2nd of May 2010 and ending on May 16th.
With SCOOP Poker Tournament, being one of the biggest online tournaments with millions of guaranteed prize money, this could be your chance to win big.
This year, there’s a total guaranteed prize pool of $45,000,000 to be divided over 38 events. With a lowest buy-in of $11 and a highest buy-in of $10,300 there’s a play for every bankroll. Every event is divided into 3 different buy-in levels, low, medium and high with their own prize money.

As always, there’s the possibility to qualify for big events like SCOOP with satellites that are running right now. Click on the Events section in your PokerStars client and then select SCOOP to see the full list of satellites.

And to top it off, PokerStars.tv will be covering the SCOOP series, with articles and tweets from Team PokerStars Pro. Wouldn’t it be cool that a pro player like Daniel Negreanu or Joe Hachem could be commentating your play?

Here are some stats from last year’s SCOOP series, the first ever.
49,029 unique players (199,958 Buy-ins) played in 22 different events, totaling a total prize money pool of $38,324,830. The SCOOP 2009 Series played in 163 different countries, with 118 countries who cashed.
In total there were 33,639 players (not unique) who cashed and the United States was the country with the most cashes (13,418), followed by Germany (3852 cashes) and Canada. Belgium, my home county had 238 cashes and ended on place 20. This year, I’m going to make sure I’m one of those cashes and hopefully more than once

Are there any particular events in the SCOOP series you’re looking forward to?

Just a few months back I finally made my first $100 starting from scratch and now I already have the $200 mark in sight.
Actually if you take into account that I also won a $16,50 PokerStars SCOOP ticket, I’m over $200 right now
But that ticket is to use in the next SCOOP games on PokerStars only so I can’t cash it in for the value of the money. But On the other hand, what if that ticket wins me a lot more cash
At the moment I’m only playing tournaments with a buy-in of maximum $4, so a $16,50 tournament will earn four times as much if I’m in the prizes.

Cash games are going great lately, with winnings 80% of the time I play cash games. And the times I loose I’m still able to minimize the losses for that particular game.
The best session was when I bought myself in into $0,10/$0,05 game for $10 and ended up winning $35 in about an hour later. In that session, I almost immediately read the table and knew when to bet or to fold. And another nice thing was that I also got the cards I needed if necessary.

Besides cash games I also started playing in the Double or nothing 1-Table Sit ‘n Go’s with a $1+$0,15 buy-in. Till now with great success, 10 sit ‘n go’s played, winning in 9 of them.
But the playing experience I don’t like in this particular sit ’n go. As soon as there 6 players left, everybody starts to wait for the one that makes an error. So I start steeling blinds by then, but it almost cost me the victory in a few occasions. Most of the times when at this stage there are only 2 or 3 players who are still actually play poker then and it’s cruel that one of these players have to lose because they’re actually playing. I hate PASSIVE players.
True it’s a tactic to wait for others to make errors, but the one time I didn’t win in the Sit ‘n Go, I was really pissed, not on the player who beat me, but on the wanker that always folded. He got lucky in the round before when he almost lost on the big blind, but hit an Ace on the river, doubling him up for a few extra rounds.

I’ll keep you posted.