Lottery Sit-and-Go’s are arguably the hottest thing going in online poker. Seemingly every online poker site and network is adding its own version of the game to its lobby. One exception, though, is Unibet. In an interview with PokerIndustryPRO (paywall), Unibets’ Head of Poker, Andrew West, explained that his site has no plans to join the fray and launch a Lottery Sit-and-Go variant.
Standard poker, whether it be ring games, Sit-and-Go’s, or multi-table tournaments, can be a heck of a lot of fun. Poker can also get boring. Games can become a test of patience and willpower, as players just fold, fold, fold, check, fold, and maybe raise once in a while. When I played regularly, I was a tight player myself, but just as I hated it when the table was too loose and crazy (I know, I should like that), it got incredibly irritating when everyone was as tight or tighter than I was.
Lottery Sit-and-Go’s appeal to many types of players, but particularly those that just want to play some action-filled poker with a chance at a big payout and then get on with their day. These types of games are generally three-handed (there are exceptions), short-stacked, hyper-turbo Sit-and-Go’s, so players can’t just sit around and fold their way into the money. At the same time, the prize pool is not known to the players until the game starts. Once the game begins, the prize pool is revealed; it is usually only going to be two or four times the buy-in, but on rare occasions, it can get as high as thousands of times the buy-in, depending on the site. This is where the “lottery” part of the name comes in. While it is unlikely that you will see a huge prize pool and corresponding first prize, it is entirely possible to make a huge chunk of change for a small buy-in in just a matter of minutes.
Recreational players, in particular, have flocked to Lottery Sit-and-Go’s. And in many cases, seasoned pros have followed, going where the action is. It seems like if a poker room wants to survive, it needs to add Lottery Sit-and-Go’s.
But Andrew West said that’s not going to happen at Unibet. “At some stage,” he said, “a feature becomes industry standard and you lose players by not having it. I don’t think that’s where Expresso-like games are yet, and I don’t think they’ll get there any time soon.”
Expresso Poker was the original Lottery Sit-and-Go, launched by French site Winamax in 2013.
What West and his colleagues don’t like about the games is the high variance. With stacks so short, blind levels so fast, and blinds hitting players almost every hand, it sometimes seems that “lottery” has to do with the luck it takes to win. Certainly, there is still skill involved and the best players have been able to modify their usual strategy to win more often than casual players, but it can definitely get tricky to navigate such a wild game.
“They’re definitely fun, but they’re too high variance for there to be many winners, and I think you need winners for games to have a future. They’re also vulnerable to 3rd party software granting huge edges,” West said.
PokerScout currently ranks Unibet as the 12th largest poker room on the internet, with a seven-day average of 650 cash game players. The popularity of Lottery Sit-and-Go’s has actually skewed rankings such as this, as some sites have lost cash game traffic despite retaining their customers, as players have migrated from cash games to Lottery Sit-and-Go’s.