Full Tilt Poker introduced the world to Rush Poker at the beginning of 2010, marking not so much a major change or shift in the online poker industry, but at the very least the first new game type to really gain popularity and stick in quite a long time. It took a couple years, but many other poker rooms and networks eventually followed suit, creating their own copycat “Fast Fold” poker variants. The games are here to stay and perhaps surprisingly, have appealed to both casual and serious players alike.
It now looks like there might be another new game type that is taking root, set to become another staple of internet poker. Lottery Sit & Go’s, as they are called, have been around for about a year, but it has only been within the last couple months that people have begun to really sit up and take notice. And it appears that they might really take a foot hold this fall. According to PokerFuse.com, PokerStars may launch its version of the Lottery Sit & Go, Spin & Go, as early as October.
French poker room Winamax.fr introduced the world to this type of game in July 2013, calling it Expresso Poker. The concept is pretty simple. They are three-handed, ultra-super-mega-turbo Sit & Go’s, generally with a winner-take-all prize pool. Before the game starts, nobody knows exactly what that prize pool will be – it is announced at the start of the contest and determined randomly. The most likely outcome is that it will be twice the buy-in (about 75 percent of the time), but depending on the poker room, it can reach as high as 1,000 times or even 2,000 times the buy-in. Hence, the “Lottery” nickname.
The iPoker Network launched its version, Twister Poker, in January of this year, followed by Full Tilt’s Jackpot Sit & Go’s in June and PokerStars’ Spin & Go’s this month on its Spain site. Each site’s version works pretty much the same way, though there are some slight differences in possible prize pools and in the probabilities of getting those prize pools. Full Tilt Poker also awards all three players money at the highest prize pool levels.
It is the possible upcoming launch of Spin & Go on the huge PokerStars “dot com” site that could really change things, though. Currently, the third, fifth, ninth, and tenth largest poker sites/networks according to PokerScout’s rankings have Lottery Sit & Go’s. Adding the main PokerStars site, though, would be something entirely different, as it is more than three times as large as those other four poker rooms combined (and these numbers are just for cash games – PokerStars leads the world in tournaments, too). That would expose Lottery Sit & Go’s to a giant portion of the poker market, likely boosting their popularity even more.
