In early July, PokerStars launched its version of the popular Lottery Sit-and-Go, dubbed “Spin & Go,” on its Spanish site, PokerStars.es. It was a test run of sorts, giving PokerStars a chance to evaluate the game’s popularity before rolling it out worldwide. It appears the returns were positive and now the world’s largest poker room has introduced Spin & Go’s on its flagship site, PokerStars.com.
Spin & Go’s are the latest craze in the sit-and-go tournament world, designed to provide action-seeking players with some excitement and the poker room with a quick rake turnaround. They are three-handed, hyper-turbo Sit-and-Go’s with just 500 chip starting stacks. Yes, they finish super fast. So far, other than the structure, they are like any other single table tournament. But here’s the twist: the players do not know what the prize pool will be until the tournament starts. Once the third person registers, a spinner appears on the table to display the prize pool, which will be 2x, 4x, 6x, 10x, 25x, 100x, 200x, or 1,000x the buy-in. About three-quarters of the time, the prize pool will be just double the buy-in, but as you can see, it could turn out to be huge. Thus, the “Lottery Sit-and-Go” moniker for these types of games.
PokerStars has changed things up a bit from the earlier, initial Spin & Go rollout, adjusting the prize probabilities based on the buy-in level. There are five different buy-in levels: $1, $3, $7, $15, and $30. Here’s a look the prize probabilities:
$1 Spin & Go
2x buy-in – 77,380 out of 100,000
4x buy-in – 13,510 out of 100,000
6x buy-in – 8,000 out of 100,000
10x buy-in – 1,000 out of 100,000
25x buy-in – 80 out of 100,000
100x buy-in – 15 out of 100,000
200x buy-in – 10 out of 100,000
1,000x buy-in – 5 out of 100,000
$3 Spin & Go
2x buy-in – 74,380 out of 100,000
4x buy-in – 16,510 out of 100,000
6x buy-in – 8,000 out of 100,000
10x buy-in – 1,000 out of 100,000
25x buy-in – 80 out of 100,000
100x buy-in – 15 out of 100,000
200x buy-in – 10 out of 100,000
1,000x buy-in – 5 out of 100,000
$7, $15, and $30 Spin & Go
2x buy-in – 72,880 out of 100,000
4x buy-in – 18,010 out of 100,000
6x buy-in – 8,000 out of 100,000
10x buy-in – 1,000 out of 100,000
25x buy-in – 80 out of 100,000
100x buy-in – 15 out of 100,000
200x buy-in – 10 out of 100,000
1,000x buy-in – 5 out of 100,000
As we can see, moving from $1 to $3 decreases the chances of the lowest prize, moving all those chances to the second-lowest prize. Moving up to the three top buy-in levels further increases the probability of the 4x buy-in prize pool while decreasing the chances of the 2x prize.
If the prize pool is 2x through 25x, PokerStars’ Spin & Go’s are winner-take-all. At the top three prize tiers, which are hit just a miniscule fraction of a fraction of the time, the winner will win the entire prize pool while PokerStars will award the other two players ten percent of the first place prize.
On PokerStars’ Spin & Go webpage, it states that the rake for the $1 tourneys is 7 percent, about the industry average for hyper-turbo Sit-and-Go’s. At $3, the rake decreases to 5 percent, and at all higher buy-ins, it drops to 4 percent.