Whenever the calendar draws close to the month of May, online poker fans start to salivate at the mouth at the thought of all of the money available from Poker Stars tournaments. There is normally a lot of money available, but even by the high standards of Poker Stars the $45 million minimum prize pool that will be handed out over the 2010 Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) is quite immense.

Events will start on May 2nd and will continue to start and finish all the way through to May 16th in the 2010 iteration of the SCOOP online tournament series. This year, there will be a total of 38 different events run over that period of time. The first tournament will be a six-handed no limit hold ‘em tournament and the last one will of course be the championship no limit hold ‘em event that usually ends up rounding out tournament series both online and offline alike.

One of the major attractions of the SCOOP series that puts it above many other tournament series at Poker Stars in the estimation of some is the fact that SCOOP is actually an equal opportunity series that is open to all players regardless of what their bankroll is. In order to actually facilitate this rather than just talking without delivering, Poker Stars has created the three buy-in system that allows for low, medium and high buy-ins for shots at different prize pools.

An example of this is the first six-handed tournament mentioned above which will have a low buy-in of $22, a medium buy-in of $215 and a high buy-in of $2100. Another example is the Main Event of the tournament which will have the same three buy-in options with prize pools of $1 million, $3 million and $5 million respectively for each level.

Although the first and last events at SCOOP are both hold ‘em events, the truth is that Poker Stars has done a great job of including all kinds of different variants in the festivities. With Omaha, Stud, HORSE, Razz, 2-7 Triple Draw and 8-Game Mixed variants all showing up on the list of tournaments this year, any poker player can find an event that appeals to them.