Europe’s ring-fenced online poker markets continue to be the test labs for PokerStars. This time, it is PokerStars.fr that gets to be the guinea pig, as PokerStars introduced a new type of multi-table tournament that draws inspiration from Spin & Go’s.
Spin & Go’s, as you may well know, are three-handed, hyper-turbo, single-table tournaments in which players also start with tiny chip stacks. Other than the unique format, the big twist is that the prize pool is not known to the players until the game begins. Before the first hand, when all three players have already committed their buy-ins, a spinner appears that reveals the prize pool. About three-quarters of the time, it will be double the buy-in, but it can escalate to thousands of times the buy-in, based on pre-determined probabilities. Most of the time, the tournaments are winner-take-all, but at the top three buy-in levels, all three players split the purse, though the winner takes the lion’s share.
Spin & Go’s have been extremely popular, so PokerStars decided to take the idea to the multi-table tournament arena with the Sunday 3D. The Sunday 3D will be held each Sunday at 22:00 CET and will feature three simultaneous tournaments with buy-ins of €5, €25, and €100. Players can enter whichever they would like or, if they are feeling bold, they can enter all of them (multi-tabling is one of the wonderful aspects of internet poker).
Sunday 3D tournaments will have the same structure as Spin & Go’s: three players to a table, three minute blind levels, and 500 chip starting stacks. The big difference, though, is that the random prize pool feature is not a part of the Sunday 3D. That’s probably a good thing – the confusion and chaos that could result from randomly chose prize pools and payout structures could be tough to handle. Instead, the Sunday 3D has a more traditional prize structure, with published payout levels available right in the tournament lobby.
In fact, these tourneys feature guaranteed prize pools. The €5 has a €5,000 guaranteed, the €25 has a €10,000 guarantee, and the €100 has a €15,000 guaranteed.
Yesterday’s €5 Sunday 3D attracted 982 players and therefore had a bit of an overlay, as that was not a large enough field to hit €5,000. 90 places were paid and the winner was awarded €765. It was the same story for the other two tournaments. The €25 tourney fielded 442 players, falling just €55 shy of the €10,000 total prize pool (€22.50 of each entry went to the prize pool). The €100 drew just 130 players, ending up with a pretty substantial overlay. The guarantee was €15,000, but the natural prize pool was only €12,350.