PokerStars Announces Tentative 2015 SCOOP Schedule; Introduces 'N-Stack' Events
The winter is almost over, and spring is almost here. This means it is almost time for the return of the Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) at PokerStars.
Senior Manager, Tournament Schedule & Online Championships at PokerStars, Bryan Slick, released a tentative schedule in the TwoPlusTwo MTT Community, asking for feedback on the planned 135-events that are scheduled to take play from May 10-24, 2015.
Based on some of the feedback received in this thread, Slick is in the process of revising the schedule for the fifth time. Although the schedule has not been finalized, we now have a good idea as far as what players can expect to see on the schedule.
As was the case in prior years, the tentative 2015 SCOOP schedule groups events together in a low, medium, and high buy-ins all running at the same time. This means although the schedule plans for 135 events, there will be only 45 different starting times. Also, in most tournaments, the amount of time between blind levels will vary depending on the buy-in.
The three SCOOP main events are planned to have buy-ins of $109, $1,050, and $10,300. The guarantees for these tournaments have not yet been announced, although it is suspected they will be big based on what was on tap in previous years.
The first version of the tentative schedule includes many different types of poker variants, including the most popular no-limit hold'em, fixed-limit hold'em, pot-limit Omaha, pot-limit five-card Omaha, pot-limit Omaha hi-lo, limit Omaha hi-lo, badugi, five-card draw, H.O.R.S.E, and eight-game.
Additionally the schedule plans for events in different formats including freeze-out, rebuy, super-progressive knockout, heads-up, Zoom, six-max, four-max, heads-up, and "n-stack" tournaments.
You are probably familiar with most of these formats, except for the n-stack format, which hasn't yet been introduced into the PokerStars poker client. These tournaments are similar to rebuy tournaments, with some major exceptions.
In n-stack tournaments, players start with 1,000 chips and are given the opportunity to rebuy four times for free throughout the designated rebuy period of the tournament. A player can opt to start the tournament with 1,000 chips, can rebuy to the maximum of 5,000 chips, or rebuy one to three times keeping some chips on the side in case they bust their stack. After the designated rebuy period is over, any unused rebuys will automatically be added to the player's stack.
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