Poker News

As part of an ongoing effort to clean up its game offerings, the Microgaming Poker Network (MPN) announced recently that it will soon be making some changes to its Sit-and-Go’s. The end result will be that rather than having multitudes of related – yet different – Sit-and-Go options mucking up the lobby and spreading out the player base, MPN will have a much neater, consolidated roster of contests that make a lot more sense.

A big part of the cleanup will come in the form of standardizing buy-ins. MPN’s Poker Room Manager, Jonathon Kelly, gave an example of the current problem in a blog post, saying, “….if you want to play a SNG that has a buy in of around €10, you can choose a €10.40, €10.60, €10.80, or €11 depending on the speed and the number of players involved.”

As you might imagine, even if you aren’t familiar with MPN’s Sit-and-Go lobby, sorting through a jumble of Sit-and-Go’s with buy-ins all in the €10 to €11 range can give someone a headache. So this one that’s turbo is 10 cents less than that one, but that one is six-handed and this one is nine-handed….oh, I give up.

What the Microgaming Poker Network is going to do is take all those Sit-and-Go’s whose price points are nearly identical and make the prices identical. In the above example given by Kelly, all of those Sit-and-Go’s will become €11 contests. The fees will vary by a fraction of a Euro depending on the Sit-and-Go structure, but the buy-in plus fee will always add up to €11.

Thus, instead of around 70 different price points, MPN Sit-and-Go’s will have just 16, as follows: €0.11, €0.22, €0.55, €1.10, €2.20¸ €3.30¸ €5.50¸ €11¸ €22¸ €33, €55, €110, €215, €320¸ €530, and €1,050.

Further culling the lobby, MPN will remove all full-ring Sit-and-Go’s on February 14th. It is certainly a bold move, one that almost seems blasphemous, but in reality, Kelly said that there just isn’t the demand for full-table Sit-and-Go’s anymore. When a product stops selling, most companies stop offering it. Though there really isn’t much cost to keeping them up, eliminating them should get more six-handed and heads-up Sit-and-Go’s going (the only two options MPN will still have), which would make the poker rooms and the network more money.

Previously, MPN had already gotten rid of other “unpopular” Sit-and-Go’s, like multi-table varieties and high stakes non-Hold’em games.

The network also launched a new €0.11 Sit-and-Go variation called “10 Minute Heads-Up.” In these games, if nobody has won before ten minutes elapse, both players are automatically put all-in until one of them has all the chips. Blinds are 25/50 and players start with 30 big blinds.

“The idea came from feedback from players who only had limited time to play but wanted to play with deeper stacks,” Kelly wrote. “In this format, you know it will last a max of 10 minutes and that you can play 30 blinds deep for the full 10 minutes.”

Kelly said that MPN is looking for feedback on these Sit-and-Go’s, and if they are well-received, they will be expanded to other buy-in levels.

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