FTOPS finished about a week ago. I made a couple more deep runs in some of the events. I finished 23rd in the $500 Super Turbo and finished in the top 100 in the Rush Rebuy tournament. SCOOP hasn’t been going so great either. It is a little more than halfway through the series and I think my only close call is a bubble of the $1500 2x chance turbo. I was one of the chip leaders the whole way through and then lost AQ vs A7 blind vs blind to be a dominant chip leader on the bubble. With 65 people left and 63 getting paid I shoved AJ got called by KQ and lost the pot. That was a super frustrating bubble/loss considering I had a lot of chips before the AQ/A7 hand and knew I would do well in that.
The structures in the SCOOP tournaments are ridiculous. It is a positive thing to have good structured online tournaments but sometimes it can be a little overboard. Playing online for 22 hours straight is way too long. I think they need to adjust their structures and either make more events two-day events or just make the tournaments shorter. I guess the longer levels and deeper structures allow for more “play” and “skill” but even in structured tournaments like the FTOPS you have to be skilled to be aware of the structure and adjust. My point is that in tournaments like the SCOOP it allows more room for postflop play whereas in faster structured tournaments you need to have better preflop play. Both structures take skill, just different types of skill. With postflop play you do get more information and have more room to maneuver. I understand that those structures are better overall. I do enjoy the better structures but playing online for almost a day straight doesn’t seem right to me in an online setting. That’s like playing three days consecutively in a live tournament; Maybe even longer. I find it hard to be able to play my best when I’m awake for such a long period of time. I haven’t final tabled a SCOOP tournament yet so I don’t know how tough it really is. 
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I started writing the above paragraphs a couple of days ago and didn’t get to finish. SCOOP ended yesterday. It almost ended for me today though. I busted in 39th place in the $1k SCOOP Main Event. First place was roughly 580k. Another close call. I got knocked out about 30 minutes before play was done for the day. It was a two day tournament and I would have finished today if I had survived. I had a couple deep runs in other tournaments yesterday too but nothing panned out. That is how the cookie crumbles.
Now that I survived the FTOPS/SCOOP I will be heading to the WSOP (World Series of Poker) in a couple days. I am actually going to fly to Oklahoma for a DeepStacks camp and then onto Vegas after that. Fellow DeepStacks pro Tom McEvoy is getting married the day after I get in. I will probably attend that and get settled in to Vegas and have a couple days to myself before the WSOP hits. It will be nice to have a couple days of down time before the madness starts.
I have been slacking on the blogging. I was playing poker literally everyday and there wasn’t much to say. It would have been the same old repetitive writing which I feel I succumb to every now and then. Sorry If I am boring, I try not to be! I will be blogging and tweeting (www.Twitter.com/TristanCre8ive) very frequently while out in Vegas. If you want to know how things are going just check my twitter which will probably be updated every couple of hours.
I will be doing the free coaching I promised this week! Thursday night is the only day this week I will be able to do it. I will shoot for Thursday at 9 PM EST quite possibly 10 PM EST. I will update the blog before then to make the time certain, but it will be going down on Thursday night. Sorry again for taking so long with what I promised to do. Hopefully this is enough notice and everyone who is interested can check it out. I will be talking about Super Turbo Tournaments and strategy for them and also answering poker related questions/anything else. It will most likely be done on UStream. I have to set it all up and make sure it’s a go but I will figure it out by then.
One last question. Who is more famous GLOBALLY…Lebron James or Michael Phelps? Goodnight.
