The tenth iteration of the prestigious Full Tilt Series of Poker is just beginning its 25 event calender, but plenty of poker has already been played. Event #3, the second Hold ’em event so far, concluded earlier this week after 7 hours of hard graft. The 729 entrants contributed their $500 + $35 buy-in towards a prize pool of $364,500 – bolstered considerably by the $300,000 Full Tilt Poker guaranteed to add to the kitty.
The tournament itself was not just a straight No Limit Hold ’em affair. A triple shootout format kept all concerned on their toes. This style, for those unfamiliar, means that each table in the tournament is played like a single-table sit and go, with the winner progressing onto the next table. The sheer size of this tournament meant that in order to just reach the final table you would need to win the equivalent of 3 sit and go’s.
As with all the FTOPS events a Team Full Tilt pro was on hand to host proceedings. This time it was CardRunners founder and sit and go expert, Andrew Wiggins. An established online player, Wiggins is well known for his single table expertise, as well as his MTT prowess. Although he’s no pushover on the cash tables either, reportedly having earned over $500k throughout his short career from ring games alone. He is also a co-founder of the teaching site CardRunners, known throughout the poker community as one of the finest centers of strategic excellence.
Twenty-three of Andrew’s Team Full Tilt compatriots were on hand to compete in event #3, including: Allen Cunningham, Brandon Adams, Huck Seed, Jeff Madsen, Ram Vaswani, Roland de Wolfe and Scott Fischman. By all accounts it was not a terribly good tournament for the big names, with FT Pro Marco Liesy the very first player eliminated. In addition, only one of the sponsored set managed to cash.
That player was Aaron Bartley, who looks like he might have a good series ahead of him. Out of three events he has been the highest pro finisher two times, ending in the money in event #1 just a few days earlier. His skills are already well known to many, having three WSOP cashes to his name, as well as over $200,000 in live tournament earnings.
In the end though, none of the pros came close to the top spot, eventually captured by mrvogt. He took home $76,545 for his troubles, as well as the prestigious title of being an FTOPS event champion.
Final table payouts were:
1st – mrvogt – $76,545.00
2nd – runemowgli – $51,030.00
3rd – zman2224 – $36,450.00
4th – MIsTeRLiQUoR – $27,337.50
5th – hockeymaniax – $20,047.50
6th – Bubbagump29 – $14,580.00
7th – Faborizer – $10,206.00
8th – Tiahuanico – $6,925.50
9th – FromAbove – $4,920.75