The original jackpot Sit-and-Go
The age-old board game Monopoly is based on the streets of Atlantic City, so seeing it used for a French poker promotion is a little odd.* But there it is, currently co-branded with French poker site Winamax in a special “Expresso x Monopoly” promo. The contest started about a week ago and runs until October 20th.
Expresso is Winamax’s version of the jackpot Sit-and-Go, a three-handed, hyper-turbo Sit-and-Go with a random prize pool ranging from 2x to 10,000x the buy-in. Most of the time, it is winner-take-all, but all three players win a portion of the prize pool when it is at least 50x the buy-in. PokerStars’ Spin & Go is what everyone thinks of when the topic of jackpot Sit-and-Go’s comes up, but Winamax was the site that invented it.
Play poker, collect game pieces
When the prize pool multiplier is the minimum – 2x the prize pool – an Expresso x Monopoly game is initiated. It is a pretty clever promotion, if you ask me. At the start of the tourney, one of 33 Monopoly spaces will be randomly chosen to be a prize. Here is the rundown:
Properties: Awarded to the winner. Collect all properties of one color and win a prize ranging from a freeroll ticket to 100x the buy-in.
Railroad stations: Awarded to the winner. Collect all four stations to win one free bet worth the amount of the Expresso buy-in.
Utilities: Awarded to the winner. Collect both and winnings are doubled for the next three Expresso tournaments.
Luxury tax: The players who lose the Expresso tournament will lose the last card they won from an incomplete collection.
Go to Jail: The two players who lose the tournament will only play for the normal Expresso prize in the next three x2 Expresso tournaments, not the Monopoly spaces. If one of those players wins an Expresso, they get out of jail early.
There are also Chance and Community Chest cards, which are drawn by the winner. These can have either negative or positive results. The most common are Go to Jail and Get Out of Jail Free, each of which has a 20 percent chance of coming up with both Chance and Community Chest. Get Out of Jail free cancels a player’s next trip to jail.
Rarest spaces give best prizes
The most common property cards are the two brown ones, each of which will come up 7.5 percent of the time. Players who collect both will earn a seat in the €25,000 Monopoly freeroll, held on October 21st.
The least common properties are, naturally, the two dark blue spaces, which have likelihoods of 0.05 and 0.10 percent. Getting both gives the player 100x their Expresso buy-in.
As one might guess from some of the prizes, there are different collections for different buy-ins. So collecting, say, Avenue Mozart in a €5 Expresso x Monopoly game adds it to a different collection than an Avenue Mozart from a €10 game. And naturally, winning a prize that multiplies winnings in a subsequent tournament will only have that effect in a tournament at the same buy-in level.
*Or maybe not really, considering how many branded versions of Monopoly have been made.
