What’s the one thing better than winning $300,000 playing a poker tournament? No, it’s not winning $3m smart-a**. The correct answer is winning $300,000 in less time than it takes to watch the first two Hobbit movies. That exciting prospect is exactly what PokerStars are offering in the third ever Turbo Championship of Online Poker (TCOOP), which starts on January 23 and runs until February 2.
Unlike the WCOOP and SCOOP festivals, which are known for their amazing structures and deep stacked tournaments, the TCOOP’s whole mission statement is to make lots of people rich quickly. In the previous two TCOOPs it took just 2 hours and 10 minutes on average to make the cash, while one tournament lasted a mere 107 minutes from start to finish.
This third incarnation will be guaranteeing $15m across 50 events, with all eyes on the $700 Main Event on February 2, which has an additional guarantee of at least $300k for the winner. Like with most PokerStars festivals there will be a wide spread of buy-ins, ranging from just $7.50 for Event #32, a 3x NLHE Turbo with rebuys, all the way up to $2,100 for Event #47, the NLHE High Roller. Of course, tons of satellites are running right now on the site for each and every event also.
The TCOOP is undoubtedly a fun and exciting way to play poker – especially in this world where we all have little spare time on our hands – but do these ultra-fast tournaments require any skill or are they just total crapshoots? It’s clear that more luck is required than in a standard online tourney series but having an understanding of the format can also pay big dividends. At the last TCOOP Danish player Tjepan made two final tables and had four top 20 finishes to win the TCOOP Tournament Leader Board and go a long way towards proving it isn’t all luck.
The series gets kicked off on January 23 with a $27 NLHE 6-max turbo that has a $750k prize pool guaranteed. That one should take around four hours to complete, have a hefty chunk of money up top and, better yet, even suffering a brutal bad beat in that tournament would still be more fun than sitting through the interminable Hobbit hijinks of Gandalf, Bilbo Baggins and co.
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