The Full Tilt Online Poker Series may have finished, but its little brother has only just begun. The MiniFTOPS XVII has an identical schedule to the original FTOPS, yet with buy-ins at only a fraction of the cost. Event #11 was structured as a knockout tournament where players receive $2 for each player they send to the rail. A total of 25,674 players put down $12 + $1 to shatter the $200,000 guarantee. A prize pool of $256,740 was created with 3,240 places to be paid.
The knockout event was hosted by poker professional Valdemar “Luigi” Kwaysser. Luigi began playing Five-Card Draw in 2005 before taking up No Limit Hold ‘Em. He quickly learned the game and went down the multi-table tournament route. His first success in a live tournament was his win at the Latin American Poker Tour in San Jose, Costa Rica (which he qualified for online) netting him $274,102. On June 20th of 2010, he won his first World Series of Poker bracelet in the $10,000 Pot-Limit Hold ‘Em event and won $617,214. Unfortunately, he was unable to find the same luck during Event #11 of the MiniFTOPS and finished in 14,927th place.
The final table and their respective payouts were as follows:
1 – bignamba10 – $37,150.28
2 – Tuan_505 – $24,390.30
3 – BGHAN – $16,944.84
4 – FraRoma87 – $12,066.78
5 – kunkles27 – $8,472.42
6 – newvdc – $6,161.76
7 – bdecker7649 – $4,621.32
8 – resiak1 – $3,414.64
9 – Woodik_chel – $2,413.36
Congratulations to bignamba10 on his huge win and his silver jersey!