With every passing day of the jam-packed 2012 TCOOP schedule, PokerStars is proving that tournament poker is as healthy as ever. Event 42, the $33 Rebuys NL tournament, had a $300k guaranteed prize pool, but it was almost half that before a single re-buy was even made. And after getting almost 2.5 re-buys per participant, the guaranteed pool was blown out of the water with $515,640 at stake.
What makes tournament poker, though, goes far beyond the money prizes. The success stories of players being pulled out of anonymity to be 먹튀사이트 crowned a champion is the real essence of tournament poker that has made the game so popular. And sure enough the TCOOP is crowning unheard of champions every day.
Event 42 was no exception, as the longest lasting PokerStars pro “bubbled out” of the final table. Henriqu Pinho was the last player left sporting the red spade, but with 11 players left he shoved pocket 5s into BackstabX_x’s Suited Big Slick. The small pair held up until BackstabX_x caught a fateful K on the river.
Not only did this ensure that the entire final table would be players still making a name for themselves, but it also cemented BackstabX_x as the chip leader at the final table. At the beginning of the final 9, he had more than double the stack of the second place player with over 14 million in chips.
And he never looked back, both starting and finishing in fashion. He knocked out two of the first three players to go at the final table, and then proceeded to eliminate the final three foes in just 10 hands!
Winning 10 of the last 12 hands of the tournament wrapped it up for BackstabX_x, the latest Average Joe of poker to be crowned a TCOOP champion. In less than 5 hours and just over $30 in investment, BackstabX_x went from a longtime break even player to having ~$80k in career winnings.
In just under two hours, PokerStars user alberto ka managed to rake in $90,728.44 during his TCOOP Event 19 win. The tournament, which featured the standard No Limit Hold’em, was played at Hyper Turbo speed.
So far, the Turbo Championship of Online Poker has been a smashing success for PokerStars. In Event 19 alone, some 2,724 players ponied up the necessary $210.80 buy in, bringing the total prize pool up to $574,219.20. As with several earlier events, this figure represented almost a doubling of the guarantee (which, in this case, was $300,000).
It wasn’t just the amateurs who enjoyed the Hyper Turbo action, either. More than 30 PokerStars sponsored players joined the fray, with five managing to make bank. The best of these were 2011 WSOP Champ Pius Heinz (162nd, $689.06), Nacho Barbero (62nd, $1,033.59), and Matthias De Muelder ($1,291.99).
In the end, however, the action boiled down to just two men — Brazil’s alberto ka and Russia’s daitemillion. It was the Russian, in fact, who held the chip lead for much of the battle between the two. But then, alberto ka managed to snag a queen-high flush on the turn. The two traded several raises before ka found himself all in and ahead against his opponent’s two pair. Five hands later, the match was over.
The final table (which interestingly enough had 9 different countries represented) paid out as follows:
1st: BackstabX_x ($80,896.62)
2nd: adkaf ($60,072.06)
3rd: megamakar ($42,540.30)
4th: Patq74 ($29,133.66)
5th: MagicCoin ($21,194.70)
6th: framerica ($16,758.30)
7th: yuanj ($11,601.90)
8th: Filurn ($6,445.50)
9th: markoes1 ($4,125.12)
