PokerStars SCOOP 2024: Third Year with $75 Million Guarantee

PokerStars’ legendary Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) is back this year. However, not much has changed. Our previous article talked about the released dates for this tournament. Now, the poker room’s released the overall guarantees. Shockingly, it showed an overall guarantee of $75 million for the third consecutive year! Let’s discuss this tournament’s recent history before seeing what’s new with this year’s event.

This flagship tournament for the spring championships debuted in 2009. It had a $33 million guarantee and 66 events. It was only in 2017 that the series showed some growth. Gradual increases in the overall guarantees became common for each year.

Excluding 2020, an outlier with an extremely high overall guarantee due to the pandemic, it was easy to predict the tournament’s range. However, after 2020, we saw fluctuating figures, with 2021 seeing a $100 million guarantee while 2022 saw just above $75 million.

However, it seemed the tournament’s overall prize pool finally plateaued, as it remained about $75 million for the last three years. What hasn’t plateaued is the average guarantee per event, which has been showing a downward trend ever since the guarantees rose. In the 2024 SCOOP, it’s the lowest it’s ever been.

This year, SCOOP presents a $75 million prize pool again, but it has more events. The tournament runs from May 5th to the 29th.

All events are divided into three buy-in tiers: low, mid, and high. Due to the new count of 128 events instead of the previous 121, there are 384 events altogether. That’s 5% more than the 363 events we saw at last year’s SCOOP! This increase in events results in the lowest average buy-in this tournament has ever seen at $200,000. 

However, it’s also the most events this tournament has seen if we exclude 2020. Buy-in tiers will also have specific ranges:

• Low: $2.20 and up
• Mid: $11 and up
• High: $55 and up

Besides the usual events, which remain largely the same, there’ll also be some new ones to try out. SCOOP is finally debuting mystery bounty events, with 12 tournaments boasting prize pools between $150,000 and $500,000.

Another highlight is the women’s Progressive Knockout events featuring $5.50, $22, and $109 buy-ins. Besides this event, we can expect to see single re-entries bounties, freezeouts, and variants other than Hold ’em.

Three Main Events kick off on May 26th, played in the No-Limit Hold ’em format. These events play out over four days and collectively have a prize pool of $10.5 million. This figure is slightly below last year’s guarantee, but the buy-ins are the same at $109, $1,050, and $10,300.

With the third consecutive year of a $75 million guarantee, we can’t help but wonder whether this is the new normal for SCOOP. Regardless, the series continues, having attracted over 13.5 million participants over the years. However, whether this year can overtake last year, ranked as the sixth-largest event in SCOOP’s history, remains to be seen.