WCOOP Satellite Update

Aren't satellites those things that orbit the earth and beam TV shows and stuff down at us? What the hell do satellites have to do with poker? Nothing you idiot! HA HA!

Actually a satellite is a name for a specific kind of poker tournament where instead of cash prizes, the top finishers win entries into larger tournaments. For example, let's say you wanted to play in the $530 NL WCOOP event so you could compete against yours truly. But, $500 is way more than you'd normally spend on a poker tournament. You could enter a satellite. Let's say you found one that had 100 players who each paid $55 to enter. After $5 from every player goes to the house, you've got $5,000. Instead of first place getting $2,000, second getting $1,000 and so on, all of the top spots (in this case 9) pay an equal $530 entry to the WCOOP event. The remaining $230 would go to 10th place (or sometimes 10th-13th would all get $55 and 14th would get $10). This is a great way to build up big fields for special tournaments. After all there really aren't that many $500 tournament players out there and they're not too excited about just butting heads with each other when they can chop up a bunch of yahoos instead.

Not surprisingly pokerstars has gone buck nuts with the satellites for the WCOOP. Some kind of satellite for one of the WCOOP events starts AT LEAST every 15 minutes around the clock. There are regular cash satellites, there are rebuy satellites (where you can buy more chips if you go broke for a certain amount of time), there are turbo satellites (with 5 minute limits), there are satellites you can buy into with frequent player points (FPP's) and to answer the million dollar question....yes, there are turbo-rebuy satellites that you can buy into with FPP's. If you want in, they want to help you.

Also as a VIP member (ummm yes just put my monocle next to the martini that my butler just made for me) I get the bonus of playing in a few FPP buy in events where pokerstars has juiced up the prize pool. Basically the way FPP's work is every time you do anything on pokerstars you earn FPP's. You can trade them for merchandise of all shapes and sizes from cups and T-Shirts to IPOD's and flat screen T.V.'s to a Porche (It's 3,000,000 FPP's). You can also trade them for gift certificates or tournament entries and if you do the math you'll discover that there are exactly 62.8 FPP's to the dollar. So how does pokerstars juice up the prize pool? Well, you can buy a $215 WCOOP seat directly from the pokerstars FPP store for 13,500 FPP's, or you can play an FPP buy in satellite where they give away one seat for every 13,500 FPP's in the prize pool. But, a few times a day they run satellites where they might give away a seat for every 6,250 FPP's in the prize pool (sometimes it might be a $1050 seat for every 33,000 FPP's instead of every 66,000 FPP's- they do it for all buy-in levels). This is the same as just throwing extra money into the pot and I've tried to catch as many of these as I can.

So how have I done in all of these various satellites? If you're one of my backers I'm sure you'll want to know, because although we haven't talked about it in a month, you are all in for the satellite action as per our agreement. So far I've played 33 of various flavors with buy-ins ranging from $16 to $100 (in the case of FPP buy-in events I just did the math and noted them as if they were cash buy-in events since FPP's effectively have cash value). I went 0 for my first 15, but then I turned things around a little winning a $320 seat on try number 16. I picked up a $215 seat on my 19th try, but then went cold again and found myself stuck $513 after 28 attempts. Luckily on attempt 29 and 32 I won $530 seats! One of these was today before I started WCOOP event #2.

While the money won in these satellites is supposed to go to a specific event, it is transferable to other WCOOP events. The bottom line is I'm ahead $303 on satellites to go with the $154 I'm ahead in the two events so far. Tomorrow is Omaha so I won't be playing, but look out for an Event #4 preview. For now I'll just say that it has a unique format and was the event that I did best in during the 2005 WCOOP.