Have you drafted your Pick 3 SCOOP team yet? All you need to do is pick three players for the 2026 SCOOP festival, and you could win a $5K Irish Open package! Hurry – the deadline is March 1 at 8am ET.
This isn’t a joke. I had a dream about Hevad Khan. I couldn’t remember which letters in his screen name, RaiNKhaN, were uppercase. The panic had set in, because I was certain I’d picked him for my SCOOP Pick 3 Fantasy team. But, in that liminal space between panicked sleep and overwhelming daily dread, it occurred to me Khan hasn’t been in the online poker scene since my kids were in diapers.
I don’t know if it was sweat or drool on my pillow. Either way, it was a damp, uncomfortable wakeup call: deafening echoes of RaiNKhaN’s maniacal “Bulldozer” screams followed by his silent metamorphosis into a calculating, slow-moving, pre-AI, live poker zen bot. This is what happens when you’ve been thinking about PokerStars’ online champions for more than two decades. Sometimes your fantasies become nightmares.
Revealing too much... of myself
I’m old enough to have worked at PokerStars before anyone ever thought of the Spring Championship of Online Poker. I’d already lived through several WCOOPs when SCOOP ushered in another wave of champions. One would think after so many years of watching and reporting on those crushers I would be in a unique position to easily pick the best three winners for the PokerOrg Pick 3 for SCOOP contest. Yet here we are in the eleventh hour, and I’m dreaming about a guy who last posted a live poker cash in 2009.
Nevertheless, I promised to both draft and make public a team based on my (cue the eyerolls) very expert opinion. So, I’ve done what I have always done when things get too confusing and I need someone to slap some sense into me: I looked to the venerable Howard Swains, longtime COOP expert, pedant of the first order, and our Pick 3 Scout for this fantasy contest.
Howard has written all you need to know to draft your team. Here’s a quick reference list for those of you who like to prepare before you shoot your shot.
- SCOOP Big Hitters you need on your fantasy team
- Five underrated SCOOP players your rivals are missing
- The best SCOOP mixed-game masters
- The hidden factors that could decide Pick 3 for SCOOP
Here's the thing though: in 20+ years of listening to Howard Swains, I've listened very well... and then often ignored the best possible advice. Blame cocktail hours and the fact that I'm often my own worst enemy. With that in mind, I introduce...
Brad's Legends Lounge Memorial Nightmare Squad
- Pedro ‘PaDiLhA SP’ Padilha
- h3pp4p01k4
- ContraSpemSper0
Big Hitter: Always pick a Brazilian
No, seriously. Always pick a Brazilian. Their passion is unrivaled. Their courage is legendary. And if you've never wiped picanha juice off your face during an indiscreet and slightly sloshy late-night meal in Sao Paulo, you've just not fully lived. For these reasons and these reasons alone, I've made Pedro ‘PaDiLhA SP’ Padilha my Big Hitter. While his past couple of years in SCOOP haven't made him stand out on the Big Hitters list, the dude crushed the end of 2025 on the live circuit. Assuming he doesn't run off to some high roller event during SCOOP, I'm voting for Pedro.
The Field: A dark soul and a dark horse
"The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back" – Al Swearengen, Deadwood.
Sometimes you have to go with your gut, and when picking among the field, I employed an oft-tested and just as oft-failed strategy of listening not to Howard but "what feels right... right now?"
This effort might sound like a cop-out, but listen here: I spent no less than two hours picking out these two players for the wrong reasons.
The player known as h3pp4p01k4 has been a professional poker player for more than a decade. Over the last two years, he's been one of the top players in the field and has won two SCOOP titles. When he won his first in 2024, he told the PokerStars Blog, "After being a professional for over a decade, this was one of the things on the ‘poker bucket list’ to achieve."
But more than anything, he has Deadwood's Al Swearengen as his player avatar. He's my first field pick.
Finally, after nearly picking players with "donut" or "toast" in their usernames, I had a sandwich. And then I was truly ready to listen to my gut, and it said, "What do these rivals know that I don't? How could a proven player with very good results over the past two years escape the keen eye of all the people playing in this contest?"
At the time of this writing, ContraSpemSper0 has only been drafted six times, and yet they are among the top point-winners over the past couple of years. Sure, they haven't actually won a SCOOP title yet, but you know what the gut says: They are due.
So, that's my team. I'm not eligible to win or anything, but when I do, maybe they will ask me to be the Pick 3 scout next time.
And when I wake up from that dream, I'll congratulate whoever used Howard's advice on their way to the Irish Open.
Pedro ‘PaDiLhA SP’ Padilha image courtesy of the PokerStars Blog.
Want to know how to draft your team? Check out our full guide below.
