The past several weeks have been completely action-packed for online poker tournament players, both serious and recreational. Full Tilt Poker has, of course, been hosting its latest MiniFTOPS following the recent conclusion of FTOPS XVIII, and the series enjoyed a great turn-out to compliment the awesome events and guaranteed prize pools. The series was brought to an end last night as the Main Event drew to a close, leaving frra87 the winner.

Every few months Full Tilt Poker hosts a Full Tilt Online Poker Series, which offers a variety of tournaments in differing games and formats with fantastic guaranteed prize pools. Not everyone can afford entry to these tournaments, and so Full Tilt came up with the idea of MiniFTOPS, which is held a short time after each FTOPS concludes, and features exactly the same range of events, but at one tenth the buy-in. The guaranteed prize pools don’t shrink by nearly so much as the buy-ins, making these tournaments very worthwhile for all players, whether on a tight budget or not.

While there was a great variety of innovative tournaments throughout the series, the Main Event was, unsurprisingly, a very traditional No Limit Hold’Em Superstack format with a slow structure, spreading the event over fourteen hours. The one million dollar guarantee was easily met thanks to 16,910 people showing up to register for the event, and their $75+$5 buy-ins were enough to generate a final prize pool of $1,183,700 spread between the top 2,160 players, with first place receiving a massive $177,555.

As part of their marketing promotion that Full Tilt Poker is the site where one can learn, chat and play with the pros, Full Tilt provides a host for every FTOPS and MiniFTOPS event, who is either a Full Tilt Pro or some other Full Tilt celebrity. The Main Event was hosted by none other than Jennifer Harman, who almost all poker fans will know thanks to her numerous appearances on television poker shows, including GSN’s High Stakes Poker. Harman is the proud holder of two World Series of Poker Bracelets and has over two million in lifetime tournament winnings. She put in a very strong showing in the MiniFTOPS Main Event before eventually being eliminated in 191st place for $520.83.

There was well over $550,000 in prize money allocated to the final table alone, and even after four people had been eliminated that number was still in excess of $475,000. With so much money up for grabs, the final five decided that they would come to a deal, and a chop was agreed upon. Full Tilt requires that players play out a tournament even if a deal is made, so that there can be one definite title holder, but the chop assured that even after this was played out the players all walked away with pay-days ranging from $75,000 to nearly $120,000. When the dust settled, it was frra87 who won the title and received the largest share of the cash, a very respectable $118,807.87 for his troubles.

With the end of the Main Event also came the end of an extremely successful MiniFTOPS. While in the past there have occasionally been troubles with the tournament guarantees being too high in online tournament series, there seemed to be little problem for MiniFTOPS XVIII, with tournaments enjoying a great turn-out. Full Tilt doesn’t hold back and hosts such series roughly every three months, so even if you missed out on the fun this time around keep your ear to the ground and you won’t have long to wait.