Woe is the FTOPS

What the hell did full tilt do to the FTOPS this time around? I mean, I guess it's inevitable that they would screw something up after running 850 of these series over the past couple of years, but damn sometimes I just cannot understand why people insist on fixing things that ain't broke.

Now, I'm too lazy to go back and look up the last several FTOPS schedules. But here's what I do know about FTOPS 1,000,000,000,000,000 that is currently running right now: there's barely anything for the good, hard-working American poker lovers to play. And that has most definitely never happened before.

Again without bothering to go and look up the details, I know I have played in upwards of 6 or 7 events in the FTOPS in prior runs of the tournament series. I specifically recall one of the FTOPS runs probably a good two years ago or so where I received four FTOPS baseball caps for cashing in four separate events. And I definitely recall other FTOPS series where I was debating playing in that night's event almost every single night, be it the $240 PLO knockout, $216 PLO8 freezeout, or even stud hi-lo on occasion as I recall.

And yet, somehow, this time around, I am going to play in a grand total of one FTOPS tournament. That's it. Granted, I missed Event #1 this time around due to fatigue, and that was my own choice and not something of course that I could ever blame on full tilt. But otherwise, how is it that I am playing online poker almost every night during the entire FTOPS series, but cannot for the life of me find a single event to play other than Tuesday night's $216 turbo mtt? Event #1 was last Wednesday night, the standard FTOPS-opening $216 nlh mtt, which as I mentioned I missed. But then Thursday night was a $500 shootout. $500 shootout? That's the best you can come up with over at full tilt, guys? Because -- and I don't care if you're a poker blogger, if you're me, or if you're Phil fuggin Ivey -- large mtt shootouts are not profitable poker. Period. Sure, somebody wins it every time you play it. But, unlike a general mtt where you can make some decent coin for finishing in, say, the top 50 or 100 spots in the field, in a shootout, you need to absolutely straight-out win your entire table, and then you have to sit at a new table comprised solely of people who were good enough to have just won their entire tables, and you have to win that table as well, just to make it to the final table where the real money begins, where you then get to face a full table of people who were good enough to win not only their starting table, but then their second table full of all people who also won their own starting tables. To the inexperienced winning three consecutive one-table sitngos may seem a lot easier than navigating your way through a field of 3000 donkeys in a regular nlh mtt. But take it from me, it's harder. Much, much harder. Even given all of the above, I still might've given it a shot, if the buyin wasn't $500. A $500 shootout for FTOPS Event #3? Major error.

Then they followed this up with last Friday night's limit holdem tournament. Just what I'm looking for -- a chasefest. And don't get me wrong, I understand that they have other events in the afternoons on those days, but for us working stiffs in the U.S. those are of course not doable, and ultimately in the past I always played the FTOPS on at least one if not both of those second and third nights of the series. This time around, I wouldn't consider it. And I know that $500 shootout is a new event for the FTOPS, a big mistake in my view. I didn't play over the weekend as I never do, and of course as usual FTOPS misses out on an opportunity to get the "family men" active on the weekend nights when they probably have the best opportunity of all for big fields. Why not just run a regular $100 or $200 nlh event? What about a $100 rebuy or something? Can I get anything on the weekend nights?

Then here starts Week 2 of the FTOPS, and I don't even remember what Monday night's event was, but I do recall that it blew. Tuesday night was the usual $216 turbo mtt, which I played but busted early from when my pocket 9s of course ran into pocket Queens from a guy who had raised at least 17 of the previous 5 hands before the flop. And then before logging off, I went ahead and looked with anticipation to see which other FTOPS events I would be playing this week. And you know what? It's none of them None! Wednesday night is the $322 rebuy, which at that buyin level just plain sucks for 99% of full tilt's user base. Thursday is I think Stud Hi. What a joke -- no "chase to two pairs" for me. Friday is the usual Razz event, which full tilt for some reason insists on carrying an increased buyin of $322 instead of the standard $216. And since I'm not a masochist chasemonkey peabrain who tires of getting dealt rolled up Kings in the only situation where I want nothing to do with them, you won't find me razzing it up either. And then that's it, just like that, FTOPS is over.

What the hell happened to the $216 O8 event that was in the evening early in the second week for the past umpteen hundred FTOPS series? Why is there not a $100 or even a $200 rebuy tournament, instead of this insistence on making that a $322 buyin? Why is there no knockout tournament anywhere in the evenings during the entire series?

I know that pokerstars has completely given the middle finger to Americans with their WCOOP, making every single event start in the middle of the afternoon New York time, which effectively shuts out the working-guy Americans entirely and unfortunately for pokerstars simply means that what they're really running is the WCOEP since the whole thing is primarily played by Euros. But in the past full tilt has distinguished itself among all other online poker sites by offering up a very attractive mix of games available in the weekday evenings four times a year, at buyin levels and at times that are actually accessible to the average, day job-having Americans who make up a big slice of their user base. This time around, full tilt seriously dropped the ball.

Now, in addition to offering far and away the best nightly tournament structures available anywhere in online poker, thanks to full tilt we can now look to UltimateBet as the site that also offers the best regular online poker series for normal red-blooded Americans with their UBOC. And if I'm full tilt, that is the saddest part of the whole debacle known as FTOPS MCMXLVIII.