Another day, another dollar, and we also have another FTOPS event in the books!
Today’s coverage is for the FTOPS XVI event #17, which is a cash out tournament. This is a unique tournament format, currently exclusive to Full Tilt, which allows players to cah out some or all of their chips prior to the conclusion of the event. If, for instance, there is a fire in your house and you have to run away to avoid getting killed, you can simply cash out your chips and receive cash for it, without having to sit out or whatever else you would have normally done.
FTOPS XVI Event #17 was hosted by Jared “TheWacoKidd” Hamby. TheWacoKidd is a feared online tournament player, with over $1 million in career winnings under his belt.
Other pros that took part in today’s event were, among many, Marco Liesy, Gary Jones, Andrew Feldman, Daniele Mazzia, Micheal Craig and Ram Vaswani.
This event had a $200 + $16 buyin, of which $100 went into the prize pool and $100 went into the cash out pool. The prize pool was $150,000 guaranteed. Since every player started with 5000 chips, every 5000 chips were worth $100 of the cash out pool. Of course, you can only cash out until you reach the promised land: the final table.
Speaking of the final table, here are the results of the finishes 9th through 4th:
9th: crazylarry1 $2,800
8th: THE__D__RY $3,600
7th: PokerBabe31 $4,650
6th: Lee Chang $6,750
5th: KvicKiller $9,750
4th: dUT73 $12,750
And then there was 3rd. PrtyPSux and 1NEVAK6 get the money in the middle preflop. It’s the proverbial coinflip, with PrtyPSux having close to double the amount of chips of PrtyPSux, and the blinds still ridiculously low. The results?
And 1NEVAK6 finishes in 3rd place, taking home $16,875 for his efforts for the duration of the tournament. GG WP!
HU was a long and relatively boring afair. These had plenty of history together, and played a very trappy game. At the start of HU between PrtyPSux and Marinersheep, both very accomplished tourney vets, the smallest stack (Marinersheep) had about 1.8 Mil chips. The Blinds were 17K/34K/4KA, which means that we were very, very deep. Bigstack PrtyPSux had twice that, easily.
It took almost a half an hour of very trappy play, small ebbs and flows, and small ball poker for a winner to emerge:
After all the small ball poker, it was a longball move that ended everything. Marinersheep did his best, and secured a 2nd place finish and $22,500 for his efforts on the night, which is very decent considering the buy-in was of only $216. PrtyPSux, on the other hand, dominated the field, and was the last man standing with the 1st prize, the yellow FTOPS jersey avatar and $36,000 in cold hard cash, and that is even without mentioning the endless bragging rights that come with taking down an FTOPS event.
Congratulations to all who played, and remember, if you did not place or win, there’s always next time!