All the attention in the Rational Group family has been focused on Full Tilt Poker recently and its efforts to make its online poker room more recreational player-friendly, but sister site (big sister site, to be exact) PokerStars is making one small move to make its casual players smile. The world’s largest internet poker entity has launched micro stakes Spin & Go’s on its French and Spanish sites.
When Spin & Go’s were first introduced on PokerStars.es in July 2014, they came in four different buy-in levels: €1, €2, €5, and €10. Since then, the site has added €20 and €50 tourneys. PokerStars.fr has those original four plus €25, €50 and, recently, €100 buy-in levels. With the higher rollers taken care of, it is now time for the micro rollers to get something. Sure, €1 Spin & Go’s are extremely affordable, but €0.25 Spin & Go’s are even more so and as such, they have been added to both the French and Spanish PokerStars offerings.
For those unfamiliar with Spin & Go tournaments, they are three-handed, hyper-turbo, short-stacked Sit-and-Go’s. Other than the odd game type, the uniqueness of these single-table tournaments is that the prize pool is unknown until the game starts. Once three players register, a spinner appears at the table to reveal how much money in is in the kitty. Most of the time, the prize pool will only be twice the buy-in, but there is a slight – very, very slight – chance that in can grow to jackpot-level heights. In the case of PokerStars.fr, the prize pool for €0.25 Spin & Go’s can reach as much as 12,000 times the buy-in, or €3,000.
The prize pool is determined by set probabilities. As mentioned, the majority of the time, it will only be €0.50. In fact, the big prizes almost in pie-in-the-sky territory, as there is a 99.2 percent chance that the total prize pool will be €2.50 or less. Here is a breakdown of the prize pool probabilities for PokerStars.fr:
€3,000 – 4 out of 1,000,000
€300 – 20 out of 1,000,000
€50 – 30 out of 1,000,000
€25 – 100 out of 1,000,000
€6.25 – 440 out of 1,000,000
€2.50 – 8,000 out of 1,000,000
€1.50 – 79,752 out of 1,000,000
€1 – 139,590 out of 1,000,000
€0.50 – 772,064 out of 1,000,000
For the bottom five prize pools, the games are winner take all. For the top four, starting with the €25 level, all three players will get a piece of the pot. At the €3,000 and €300 levels, the winner will receive 83.3 percent of the prize pool (€2,500 and €250, respectively), while at the €50 and €25 levels, the winner will get 80 percent (€40 and €20). The second and third place finishers will split the remaining prize pool equally.
PokerStars.es does not have the prize and probability breakdown for the €0.25 Spin & Go’s yet, but reports are that largest prize pool there is only €1,200.
The new micro-stakes Spin & Go’s are on a trial run on both sites; PokerStars.fr has listed a September 30th end date, while PokerStars.es has not published a date yet. Odds are, though, as long as they are popular enough and don’t affect the overall revenue of Spin & Go’s negatively, they will become permanent fixtures. PokerStars.es was the guinea pig for Spin & Go’s originally and not only did they become permanent on the site, but they also expanded to PokerStars.com and exploded in popularity.
