The Worst Winner

~ probably some Scottish guy It's the final week of SCOOP! And despite the uninspiring run of results thus far, I had high hopes for this week, with tickets for both the hold'em and omaha (low) main events! I'd won an $11 ticket on Twitter, been holding onto a $109 power pass ticket from before SCOOP and won the $215 ticket from just 50 cents as part of the SCOOP League Team Spraggy qualification. That's $335 in buy-ins for this week at a cost of pretty much nothing, with over $250,000 up top to win!  Before the grand finale, I used my $11 ticket for a hold'em tournament but don't have much to say about that, nothing particular noteworthy.  #80-L NLHE   -$11   2571/11603 Outside the big Sunday events, there wasn't too much on the schedule this week that excited me, a lot of turbo PKOs in the later evenings, which I'm not really interested in. But that was fine, before SCOOP began I had planned to play a lot more power path tournaments to see if I could r...

As I looked back on my second week of SCOOP, I often found myself expressing the thought that a lot of the people I played against were fools who didn't know what they're doing, and if you listen to any group of poker players freshly busted from tournaments, you'll probably hear a similar sentiment. And yet, this perspective typically comes from the players who are out, the players that have not won.  A few weeks ago I was playing a live tournament and a friend, 'Brentos', was sat to my immediate right. In one hand he gratuitously doubled me up, blind vs blind, by misplaying absolutely every spot in the hand. In fact, apart from folding pre, I don't think he could have made a single worse decision on any street throughout. Afterwards, I was winding him up but he stuck to his guns and justified why he played the way he did based on how he expected me to play, despite me not doing any of the things he imagined I would do. Our cognitive bias makes us unreliable nar...

Week 1 of this year's SCOOP and I have played more events than I had planned, in part because I am part of "Team Spraggy" in the inaugural  SCOOP League  ! Look, there I am, an integral part of the team, not just some kind of afterthought or anything. A friend asked what I got for being part of the team... and... I don't know. Bragging rights? I suppose it's up to me to make something of the opportunity, some big scores would have me scrapping it out with the pros on the leaderboard. To get those points, I  need to play more tournaments and rack up some deep runs. Spurred on by being in the SCOOP League and other social media hype I found myself with some free time around the start of the first SCOOP tournament and jumped in. Ironically event #2 because #1 is the phase tournament which ironically doesn't actually conclude until the end of the series. I should have known better, the demands of parenting means I can't really play poker until 8:30pm because t...

The Spring Championship Of Online Poker (SCOOP) is upon us and as with every big series, once the schedule has been released, I like to break it down to see which tournaments stand out as my must plays. Ideally, I'd like to play everything but bankroll, work, family and life in general get in the way of that, so working around those things I have the following list: Broadly speaking, that's the hold'em and omaha tournaments that you can register after 8:30pm UK time and the main events. I'm not bankrolled to play anything above the low buy-ins but I was hopeful I could PowerPass my way to some bigger buy-in tickets but so far I have only managed to secure one $109 ticket, which I am reserving for the low hold'em main event, so unless I squeeze in some satellites successes, I'll be sticking to the low versions. This year Pokerstars have introduced the inaugural "SCOOP League" in which the brand ambassadors have split into four teams, and I guess there w...