As my fellow blogger Joanne reported earlier this week right here on CardSquad, Full Tilt is bringing back the Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS) in mid-February, marking the third FTOPS since last summer as Full Tilt continues to make inroads in the online poker space with this particular series of high-guarantee holdem and non-holdem poker tournaments. The FTOPS is really a great thing for a guy like me, because not only does it represent a nice group of large guaranteed tournaments over a short period of time in all the games I love to play, but many of the events occur at nighttime, which is the only time I ever play online poker.

Well, I am pleased to say that last night I took a big step in my quest to qualify for however many of the nighttime FTOPS events there are, which usually applies only to the weekday tournaments, as the weekend events tend to start in the late afternoon for the most part. I played a satellite tournament called an "FTOPS Holdem Avatar Race", which has been running starting this week every night at 9pm ET on full tilt, for which the buyin is $75, or a Tier II token. The great thing about this particular satellite is that the seat prizes for winning the satellite are grouped into $648 prize packages, representing three $216 buyins to each of FTOPS Event #1, Event #5 and Event #8. This is the perfect satellite for me to play in, since each of Events 1, 5 and 8 will occur during the week, starting at 9pm ET between February 9 and February 18. So, for $75 apiece last night, 57 players went at it in a no-limit holdem tournament format, with the top 6 finishers securing the buyins to each of these three no-limit holdem FTOPS events next month.

Long story short, I played aggressively and got off to a nice chip lead in what was actually my second run in this Avatar Race satellite this week, but I took a couple of bad ass beats that had my stack sitting in 12th place out of 14 players remaining, nearly 2 hours into the tournament. This was when I ended up calling an allin reraise before the flop, with me holding T9s and basically knowing I was well behind to the guy who had reraised me for most of his chips, but I also knew that folding at that point would leave me in a deep, deep hole, way in last place of the remaining players, and with almost no chance of coming back to win my seat. So, I made the call, and my T9s was well behind to my opponent's pocket Aces, until I spiked three miracle cards on the board to make a straight, stay alive, and eventually go on to survive to the end and win my three FTOPS seats, as per the graphic above. I have a full writeup of last night's tournament over on my blog, so if you're interested in reading about what I think is one of the best ways to get into a bunch of the FTOPS events for fairly cheap (relatively speaking), go take a gander at my writeup and see if this sounds like it's right for you.

This really is a great chance for many of you to play not only in the satellites for the other FTOPS events, but also in the actual FTOPS tournaments at a cheap price. There are one or two more events that I may try to qualify for in the coming days and weeks, so hopefully I will see some of you out on the virtual felt.