Your choice of online poker username can say a lot about you.
As a successful online pro, do you go for something memorable, or incorporate your real name, in a bid to strike some kind of awe into your opponents?
Or do you go for the ‘seemingly random string of numbers’ approach to help maintain some anonymity?
One notable player who has taken the latter approach is ‘king153246’, but any attempts to stay under the radar are doomed to fail when you keep on winning, and winning, and winning.
Their real name remains a mystery. We hear they’re Albanian, but don’t go looking for them on the streets of Tirana this month. They’re more likely to be holed up indoors, busy playing the Spring Championship of Online Poker at PokerStars, and they’re going hard.
Latest win makes six for 2026
Their latest victory in SCOOP 2026 came late on Thursday with a $7.5K win in the $530 fixed-limit hold’em event, and it was their sixth of the series.
No one has ever won six titles in a single SCOOP before. The previous record of five was set just last year by Simon ‘C. Darwin2’ Mattsson, but that’s now ancient history.
With almost two weeks remaining before the curtain falls on the $45M GTD tournament festival, the obvious question arises: can king153246 add even more feathers to their cap (or should that be crown)?
king153246's six SCOOP 2026 titles
| Event | Entries | Prize money |
|---|---|---|
| 06-H $1,050 NLHE 7-Max | 97 | $26,250 |
| 18-H $530 NLHE 6-Max PKO | 159 | $15,962 |
| 33-M $109 8-Game | 295 | $5,614 |
| 39-M $109 NLHE PKO | 3,237 | $35,723 |
| 52-H $530 NLHE Hyper-Turbo | 137 | $13,292 |
| 67-H $530 FLHE 6-Max | 36 | $7,539 |
Three-handed dance with the devil(s)
Title number 6 was no cakewalk, and required the six-time winner to defeat a small but talented field of 36.
Limit hold’em is not the world’s most popular variant, and the $530 buy-in is not the most rec-friendly of stakes, so the high calibre of opponent would have been no surprise.
Nevertheless, in facing the imperious ‘FAL1st’ and Benny ‘RunGodlike’ Glaser in the final three, king153246 certainly had their work cut out for them. But they rose to the challenge to take the lion’s share of the $18K prizepool, on just a single bullet.
FAL1st also fired just the one, taking third place, while Glaser entered five times but still made a profit with a payday of $4.6K for his second place finish.
Beating Benny Glaser is always a tough task.FAL1st and Team StopLossing top the Pick 3 charts
The strong finish for FAL1st is just the latest in a string of excellent results which has seen him dominate the Big Hitters section of our Pick 3 for SCOOP 2026 contest.
At the start of the series we asked you to draft a team of three, with one ‘Big Hitter’ and two from ‘The Field’. FAL1st has since set up camp at the top of the former category, and not even the heroics of king153246 seem to be able to dislodge him. For now.
Here’s how the top 10 looks at the time of writing:
| Player | Points |
|---|---|
| 'FAL1st' | 2,445 |
| 'king153246' | 2,165 |
| Renan 'Internett93o' Bruschi | 1,810 |
| Patrick 'pads1161' Leonard | 1,610 |
| 'markovitsus' | 1,020 |
| Niklas 'Lena900' Astedt | 980 |
| Jerry 'Perrymejsen' Odeen | 965 |
| 'Jabracada' | 895 |
| Benny 'RunGodlike' Glaser | 885 |
Among those playing the Pick 3 contest — and in with a chance at a package to play the Irish Poker Open in Dublin, starting March 26 — the current leader is ‘Team StopLossing’, which is out in front with an impressive 3,820 points.
The bulk of those points have come from FAL1st, who features in every team currently in the top 10, with ‘zidix’ and ‘AmateurGOAT’ also chipping in to help the team edge out in front.
‘Team Fandango’s Flyers’ is just 20 points behind, however, and the chasing pack is close behind them.
Pick 3 for SCOOP 2026 Teams Top 5
| Team | Points |
|---|---|
| Team StopLossing | 3,820 |
| Team Fandango's Flyers | 3,800 |
| Team LMT | 3,775 |
| Team The Lederhosens | 3,775 |
| Team Bradders | 3,740 |
SCOOP 2026 runs at PokerStars until March 25.
Featured image generated using AI.
