Poker Stars has just announced that it will be sponsoring the Federación Española de Baloncesto (FEB), otherwise known as the Spanish Basketball Federation for at least one year’s time.

As part of its sponsorship, Poker Stars will start offering satellite tournaments that award as their top prizes tickets to various Spanish Basketball Federation (FEB) games, including the 2010 FIBA World Championship that begins August 28 in Turkey where Spain’s basketball team, which currently holds the 3rd place ranking beneath the U.S. and Argentina, will face off against those top rivals as well as Canada, France, Lebanon, Lithuania and New Zealand, the five other teams with whom the Spanish team shares Group D.

Among the satellite tournaments awarding tickets to watch key FEB basketball games will be plenty of freeroll tournaments.

PokerStars sponsors many sporting events and hosts satellites awarding tickets to events across various sports. There are also many individual athletes on Team PokerStars, including tennis star Gaël Monfils, football goalkeeper Gianluigi ‘Gigi’ Buffon, field hockey legend Fatima Moreira de Melo, and rugby player Sebastian Chabal.

Each of the 38 events has 3 different buy-in levels with 3 different prize structures to match, making it so that anybody with any size bankroll can participate. The types, styles, and varieties of poker tournaments on the 2010 SCOOP schedule run the gamut from the typical (Holdem, Omaha, Stud) to the atypical (HORSE, Razz, 8-Game, 5-Card Draw, Badugi), and includes alll limit styles (No Limit, Pot Limit, Fixed Limit), table sizes (incl. 4-max, 6-max, and heads-up events), as well as Hi-Lo, Turbo, Rebuy, Addon, and Match Play events.

Head to PokerStars now to qualify for free into many of the 2010 SCOOP events, including the $5 million Main Event, through Poker Stars SCOOP 2010 satellites running now.

The PokerStars 2010 SCOOP—running Sunday, May 2 through Sunday, May 16—is offering lower stakes versions of each event with buy-ins of approximately 1% of the cost of the “regular” (high stakes) version. Best of all, the prize pool is far more than 1% of the prize pool for the original versions—a full 25% of 1/4th the prize pool.

So that means for event #2, the 1st of three 2-day events in this year’s PokerStars SCOOP, you low-stakes players would pay only $22 instead of $2,100, and yet be able to win a share of a $500,000 guaranteed prize pool rather than the original’s $2 million.

By the same token, the main event buy-in for low stakes players in the 2010 PokerStars SCOOP is the 2-day main event is $109 rather than $10,300 and the prize pool is $1 million guaranteed rather than $5 million.

As for the medium stakes players, the buy-ins for your 2010 PokerStars SCOOP seats are all approximately 1/10th (10%) the cost of the originals, but the prize pools are much closer to their originals, in some cases even matching the originals. Look at the kickoff event on May 2, the original being a $2,100 buy-in for $1 million guaranteed. Well the medium stakes equivalent has a $215 buy-in, but still offers a $1 million prize pool.

The prize pools for the mid and high stakes 2010 PokerStars SCOOP events aren’t always identical, but the mid-stakes prize pools are never less than half of the original high-stakes versions. And the prize pool for the PokerStars 2010 SCOOP main event for mid-stakes players, instead of $5 million, is a still handsome $3 million guaranteed.

Most mobile phones these days already have the internet built in. So all PokerStars, or any other poker site, has to do is tweak their software to make it viable (read: playable) on a 3.5″ screen, or smaller. And the way that PokerStars is doing this is by purchasing its very own mobile software development firm.

They won’t say how much they paid for Cecure Gaming, originally a Cavendish Corporate Finance property, but one thing is for sure. It is PokerStars’ latest sally in an ongoing effort to remain at the head of the pack. Expect PokerStars mobile to set the trend for mobile online poker now.

If you want to get a jump on the move to the mobile platform you can check out the existing software by using a Poker Stars Promo Code or a Marketing Code for PokerStars.

Innerspy sat down for just over 18 1/2 hours at PokerStars last Saturday and in that time played an amazing 40,088 hands of online poker. Until that time, he hadn’t played more than 20,000. But when he heard the challenge posed, he knew he was capable of taking it on, and apparently he was absolutely right.

But it wasn’t easy. To add to the pressure, this all took place in front of 10,000 fans watching over their computers.

Now that it’s over, Innerspy says it will be a lot easier for him to achieve his goal of becoming a PokerStars Supernova Elite member.