FTOPS Cometh

You know what? For the first time in a long, long time, I am actually mildly excited about the FTOPS. FTOPS XVII we're up to already, and I believe it starts this week, on Wednesday night August 4 to be exact. The opening event is as usual a standard $216 buyin no-limit tournament that you are likely to see me sitting in on Wednesday evening.

In the past, I've spent many a night trying to outlast my opponents in full tilt's quarterly mtt series. I've had FTOPS series where I've managed to participate in 9 or 10 of the events, which back when I started playing used to constitute around 2/3 of the total events in the series. I specifically recall cashing in five FTOPS events in one series way back when, which I am still reminded of whenever I bump into my stack of identical black FTOPS hats that full tilt sent me during that series, which was probably a good three full years ago or more by now.

As the FTOPS has expanded, however, and as it continues to arrive every three months and thus cheapen somewhat the value of the FTOPS franchise in my eyes, I have found myself playing in the FTOPS less and less. This decision of course is not meant to injure anybody or designed to be done in protest or anything, but rather I have just not been nearly as interested as the FTOPS has become more and more accessible to everyone, and as running into a gold jersey at my table on full tilt has become more and more commonplace at the limits I play. And most of all, full tilt has not done what I would call a good job in updating the tournaments that comprise the FTOPS. Over the past few quarterly series, I have found myself only interested in playing in two or three of the 25+ events in the entire series, either because the timing is off (as my longtime readers know I will only play in the nighttime events), or because it's not exactly my dream when I wake up in the morning to play razz for a $322 buyin with a bunch of shizzheads who can't even spell "razz" and that only has a 150k guarantee, or to play a $216 limit holdem chasemonkeydonklefest with a 250k guarantee and that will slowly deteriorate into effectively push-and-pray no-limit play with very low Ms by the time the final table rolls around. Meanwhile, there's still no high-buyin heads-up tournament as part of FTOPS, the site that lets you "play with the pros"? No $500 heads-up event or something? Come on, full tilt.

Anyways, this is not a post to slam on full tilt for what has gone down with the FTOPS. Rather, this is to say that I might actually have some interest in playing in some FTOPS events over the next couple of weeks, which is the first time I have said that in at least this year, if not longer. I cannot have participated in more than one or two total FTOPS tournaments so far out of about 60 this year spread over two series, and yet, this time around, I'm actually looking forward to getting involved and might even be willing to play an off-game in order to get my mtt junkie fix.

You see, for those few of you who don't already secretly watch every table I ever play at online, I really have not been playing mtt's lately. For a good long while, actually. I mean, of course out in Vegas in early June I was Mr. MTT. I played mtts for probably about 60% of my total time awake in Las Vegas over four days, and another 20% was spent playing cash poker as well. But as I've written about a couple of times since returning from the desert earlier this year, even though I had some great success at mtt's while out in Sin City, since then I have had a lot of trouble getting mentally up for playing in tournaments. And don't get me wrong -- I've still been playing a fair amount of online poker. Not nearly as much as when I am on a major mtt bender like seems to have been the case over maybe 60-70% of the time over the past few years, but I've been playing a fair amount of poker despite what has been an extremely hectic life both personally and professionally. Basically given all the things going on with me right now, I have been limiting myself to very short stints, things like brief cash sessions, or most commonly recently, turbo and even super turbo sngs. I've done this before, gone through a period where I am burned out on mtt's for a time, and I always come back to the good old fashioned large-field mtt, which will always be the most challenging form of poker to excel at in my book. But lately I just haven't been feeling it, and I bet I haven't played in 10 true mtt's over the past two full months if I had to guess.

But when I saw this week that FTOPS is back, something stirred inside me that I haven't felt for a few months now. A twinge, an urge. Nothing more than an inkling really, but the feeling was there and it was real. The beast is coming out of his slumber. I am pretty sure he wants to play in some of these FTOPS tournaments.

And what kind of a degenerate poker player would I be if I didn't let the beast have what he wants?