$40 Million Guaranteed and 55 Events Make SCOOP Festival History $40 Million Guaranteed and 55 Events Make SCOOP Festival History

From May 8-22, PokerStars’ Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) will be hitting our screens and this year it is the biggest it has ever been in the online poker tournament series’ eight year history.

Expanding the events to 55 (that’s nine more than last year) across Low, Medium and High Stakes there will now be 165, tournaments for players to enter.

There will be a guaranteed prize pool of more than $40 million.

SCOOP Highlights

To keep things fresh PokerStars has added in never-seen-before events to SCOOP. Some of the highlights include:

  • The first non-heads-up High-Roller event featuring buy-ins of $215, $2,100 and $21,000.
  • A 3-Max NL Hold’em Turbo, Progressive Knockout (SCOOP-45) tournament has been added in Zoom format, meaning players will be moved to a new table every hand to face two fresh opponents with bounties on their head.
  • The Mix-Max event (SCOOP-47) where the first part will be played 9-Max, the second part 6-Max, with a short break in between to transfer surviving players (and their chips) to Part 2.
  • Phase event (SCOOP-51) will see multiple phase 1s take place throughout SCOOP, leading up to the final phase 1s on May 22. Phase 2s (one per stake level) will take place later on May 22.
  • SCOOP-26 features a deep payout structure, which will see at least 20% of the field make the money.

Special Sit & Go satellites will lead up to the three-day Main Event that will begin on Sunday, May 22. There will be buy-ins of $100, $1,000, and $10,000 and guaranteed prize pools of $1 million, $2 million and $4 million.

The Stars of SCOOP

One familiar face that we can expect to see in May when SCOOP starts is Team PokerStars Pro Jason Mercier, who won three SCOOP events in 2015 to become Overall Player of the Series.

It seems that he will be aiming for the top of the Leaderboard again: “After a very successful SCOOP last year, winning three titles and the overall Player of the Series, I’m going to be fully focused on defending that title and taking down some more events,” said Mercier.

“There are 165 tournaments and an incredible array of games and formats – it’s just a great time of year for online poker players and I can’t wait for the series to start.”

Online qualifiers to all the events are running now at PokerStars with satellites starting from just $0.11 or 1 StarsCoin.

For more information on SCOOP please head over to the PokerStars’ site.