There’s no better time to be an online poker tournament player than right now, with major tournaments running basically everywhere you look. For once, the micro stakes players among us aren’t being left out, thanks to Full Tilt Poker’s Mini FTOPS XVII. The Mini Full Tilt Online Poker Series offers amazing tournaments at really low buy-ins, so nobody needs to feel excluded, and the third event of this series took place today, with Joao Dianda proving himself to be the best of the field.
The Full Tilt Online Poker Series is known for its great variety of events and fantastic prize pools, but sadly it’s also known for its rather high cost of entry. That’s why Full Tilt came up with Mini-FTOPS, promising exactly the same variety of events at one tenth the buy-in, and significantly more than one tenth the guaranteed prize pools. We’re currently in the midst of the Mini FTOPS XVII and if you haven’t already started taking part, you should definitely get on Full Tilt now.
Event 3 was a Turbo No Limit Hold’Em 6max Shootout event, which sounds like quite a mouthful. Really the most interesting part of that is that the tournament was a shootout, which means that each table must play out until there is only one remaining player before play progresses. Basically you’re playing a bunch of 6 man single table tournaments where only the winner moves forward. This kind of format means players can’t just sit idly by and hope for eliminations to take place on other tables, rather they have to fight tooth and nail from the outset to secure their place in the tournament.
The tournament buy-in was a very affordable $30 + $3, or even if that sounded a little steep to you then the plethora of satellites hosted by Full Tilt would have allowed you entry. In total 4,305 players signed up for the event, yielding a prize pool of $129,150, easily in excess of the $100,000 which was guaranteed. 648 places were paid, and to walk away with first place you would have needed to keep your wits about for just over four hours.
As with FTOPS proper, each Mini FTOPS event is hosted by a Full Tilt red pro, or a member of the Full Tilt family. Event 3 was hosted by one Matt Sexton, who is a relatively unknown player, but has proven himself to be a formidable opponent in the online world. Recently he’s started making a foray into live tournament play, and we’ll be sure to hear more of the young pro in the future. In Event 3 he wasn’t so lucky and finished in 1842nd place.
There were other red pros who managed to fare somewhat better in the tournament, however. Huck Seed, who most in the poker community know for his daring prop bets and his World Series of Poker main event win, performed the best of everyone representing Full Tilt, eventually being eliminated in 52nd place and walking away with $284.13 for his troubles.
The final two players were Joao Dianda and TheDankage, who agreed to chop the prize pool once heads-up play was reached. Chips were relatively even with TheDankage very slightly in the chip lead when stacks went into the middle and Joao Dianda’s pair of fives beat the Queen high of TheDankage. With 36 chips left, things looked grim for TheDankage who immediately doubled up and then shoved all-in the next hand with KK. Joao Dianda called with A2, and the flop fell KA2. The turn was an innocent 7, but the river was a third ace, giving Joao Dianda the better full house and the Mini FTOPS title.
Mini FTOPS is, plain and simple, a really great series of poker tournaments. It’s fantastic that the state of poker is such that we can have such a wide variety of formats and games at such low buy-ins, and this is definitely something that everybody should be taking advantage of. It’s early days for Mini FTOPS XVII, so there’s still plenty of time for you to get onto the virtual felt and show your stuff as you walk away with thousands of dollars in prize money.
The official final table results are as follows:
1. Joao Dianda – $16,708.30
2. TheDankage – $15,708.35
3. ELZAPO – $7,490.70
4. TESTurKUNGFU – $4,649.40
5. griffey1 – $3,099.60
6. NutflushPete – $2066.40