Online Poker Tourneys

Back for another year, the ever-popular Full Tilt Online Poker Series kicked off Wednesday with Event #1. The first tournament in a series of 24, taking place from May 7th to May 18th, saw WPT Championship winner David Chui as the host. Event #1 was No Limit Hold’em and buy-ins were $200 + $16 with the tables set at 6-Max.

In all, 4,158 players bought into the first tourney and pushed the $750,000 prize pool to $831,000. By the end of the day, a well-noted online player named Isaac Baron, (a.k.a. “the guru 11”) claimed $158,000 of this prize money after he took home first place. He was able to outlast “dan_dada” who finished second and took home $97, 297.

Baron is definitely the most well-known of the winners thus far as many people know him by “westmenloAA” at PokersStars. Baron won both a Sunday Million at Full Tilt Poker for $254,000 and a Full Tilt $750,000 Guaranteed for $130,000. He is also an accomplished live player as he finished fourth at the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo which earned him $932,000.

The second tournament in Event #2 kicked off yesterday at 2:00 p.m. ET and was hosted by Max Pescatori. It was a $240 + $16 Pot Limit Omaha affair and offered up a guaranteed $200,000 in prize money.

This tourney was decidedly smaller than the first with 1,070 entering but they did manage to push the prize money up to $214,000. The largest chunk of money taken by a player was the $48,150 won by Event #2 champ “whothedonk” who was able to defeat “gregguiche” in heads-up play. But gregguiche still pocketed $30,495 for second place.

Event #3 drew plenty of interest before the FTOPS started as it was dubbed one of the three “mystery tournaments”. Well the mystery for this tournament turned out to be a No Limit Hold’em Triple Shootout with a buy-in of $500 + $35. $300,000 of guaranteed money was the plan for the 729 maximum player field.

David Pham was the host of the event that concluded early this morning and a couple of well-known Full Tilt pros in Mike Matusow and Erick Lindgren were on hand too. Both of them finished in the money but neither was even close to the winner of the event, “BOP B 3AKOHE 1”, who cashed in for $76,545. What’s great about the unheralded BOP B 3AKOHE 1 is that this player was able to take down seasoned pro David “davidp 18” Peters in the finale. Peters grabbed $51,030 for the second place finish.

With three events down, there are still 21 tournaments to go with the Marco Traniello-hosted Event #4 currently taking place. Make sure to check back with PokerWorks for more updates of what’s going on with the FTOPS VIII.