Is this a level? Villain will only have fewer outs if hero has some of villains outs in his hand.

Of course I don't, it's just *** man I've been getting sucked too much lately that I'm sucked dry,exhausted. Just went all in an hour ago with KK guy calls with 83o. And makes a straight. Before that I played a game and had 1200ish chips and the remaining players had 150ish chips between them, u know what I said outloud to myself? "I bet ya I'm still gonna lose" So i get pocket 9's and shove to end the game,dude calls with k9 and hits trip k's, **** it man why not give em quads fer****sakes.lmao. and of course i lost the game. Gonna get a book on plo.

It was threehanded, he opened shoved with around 540 chips and I had about 460. blinds were 10/20.

The top multiplier is only going to happen .005% of the time on average for any given person. There is more to consider than just what your edge is against your two opponents when considering to deal and/or what amount to deal for is this kind of format.

Sure, use your bargaining power, but I certainly wouldn't call someone stupid or fault them for not passing up on a deal that would secure them an equal share of this money, even if they did in fact have a smallish edge on their competition.

You are right.. there is a lot more to consider, esp. how bad he wants the chop.. the more he wants it the more i get

And who knows in what kind of deal the other player is in, if he shares variance e.g. So he might be under a lot less pressure than you are..

My point was more about the fact that it takes a player to hit a lottery which only happens .005% of the time to be put in this situation. Your edge is small, in the single percentiles, considering the average competition in a hyper format.

Stars allocating 10% to 2nd and 3rd helps in the fact that you will not come out empty handed when you hit this lottery but there are still 900 buyins up top.

At the frequency that one hits this lottery you're probably better off dealing an even split and investing the extra money into something offline than you would be to except no deal and push your small edge at the table.

Hello all,

The Spin & Gos have been running for just over two weeks now, and have been very well received by the players in general. There have been some teething problems, but in general, we are very happy with how the launch went and how the new game has been received by the players.

I have been keeping an eye on this and other Spin & Go related threads in the forum, so it is time to respond to the issues that have been raised since the launch. I am not going to quote individual posts, but I made a list over the various comments I have seen you make, and will now go through this list, item by item.

Timing of the launch

It seems that some of you have been unhappy with the timing of the launch and some also feel that we should have given early notice about our plans to launch Spin & Gos. To this last point, I would like to refer to Steve’s post in July where he announced that we were going to launch Spin & Gos on .com at some point in the not too distant future. He also laid out a some of the thinking that went into this decision. In addition, it was not a secret that we had launched Spin & Gos on .es, .it and .fr, so it should not have been a shock that .com and the shared liquidity licenses were waiting their turn as well.

As for the timing, I am sure that some players would have felt it was bad regardless of the time we eventually chose. As I see it, introducing this new game with three months remaining of the year should not prevent anyone from achieving their VPP goals. There are still a lot of games running, and if you have kept somewhat on pace, this launch is unlikely to prevent you from reaching your target. Of course, if you are far behind pace, you may see things a bit differently, but in that case you were vulnerable to any unforeseen event in your life.

Why have we argued against certain games on the grounds of marginal liquidity, and then launch Spin & Gos which evidently steal liquidity from other games.

What most players have in mind when asking along these lines is the non-deployment of 18-man hypers. It is true that we have not implemented that game because we were concerned that they might take away from the Turbo and Regular speed counterparts of the 18 and 27 player variety.

The difference, however, is that deploying the 18-man hypers would likely just move existing players from one tournament to another, while the Spin & Gos are bringing literally tens of thousands of new and previously inactive players to the site. Making changes that favour one set of players over another is not something that benefits poker in the long run.

Anyone who has followed the online poker market over the past few years will recognize the fact that it is more and more difficult to get new players to the tables. So when a new product comes along that captures the imagination of a wide range of players, it is not something that we can just pass on because we don’t want to upset the regular players. If we had decided to stand pat with the current offering for the next couple years, chances are that soon your games would have been far more reg-filled and running less often than you will see now due to the addition of Spin & Gos.

Another aspect of this is that we cannot lose sight of the fact that we are a business and that we do business in a competitive environment. And as a business, we need to provide the products that are pleasing to our customers. Clearly given the popularity of Spin & Go, we have many customers who like the format, are pleased that we have offered it, and based on the overall volume of play on our site it is clear that players are overall happier than they were before. We do need to keep adapting to provide the games that our customers as a whole prefer. If we don’t, someone else will.

In general, we spend our development resources on the features that have the most positive impact on the greatest number of players, and the development and launch of Spin & Gos is likely to reach the greatest number of players that we have seen in a very long time.

There is no transparency to show that the prize pool draw is really honest.

Aside from showing exactly how many tournaments are being played at all buy-ins, it is difficult to offer complete proof of the randomness of the draw. Because the numbers are business sensitive, we don’t want the specific numbers to become public. It is important to bear in mind, however, that we are regulated by arguably the most serious and experienced online regulator in the world. They make sure that we comply 100% with the laws and regulations of this jurisdiction, and can at any time audit all sides of the business.

In addition to this, we can point to our track record, which is one of the main reasons why PokerStars have achieved the position as the undisputed market leader in online gaming. We have always tried to do right by our players, and we do not intend to stop that now. What I can tell you is that currently, we have been running a little bit over EV, but only by about 0.08%. I can also tell you that five days ago, we were running about the same under EV. We are certain that the draw is fair and reflects the reality that we present on the web site.

Deal making

I think it is safe to say that this is the topic that has been most discussed during Spin & Gos first couple of weeks on .com. Most regs seems to be in favor of having deal making available for at least the highest tiers, even though there are also regs who are against it.

We have not made a final decision on whether or not deal making will be allowed for Spin & Gos at all. Manual deal making with the assistance from support is definitely out of the question. The sheer numbers, even with only the top few paylevels supported, would be too much to handle. That leaves the automated deal tool, but it is not at this moment clear when that will be available on all of PokerStars’ platforms.

Rake

Understandably, a recurring topic in everything we do. As for the Spin & Gos on .com, we have chosen a rake level that is significantly lower than any of our competitors. I have seen claims that our Spin & Go rake is higher than for similar buy-in 6-max cash hypers. Here is a table that shows the current rake for 6max hypers and Spin & Go by buy-in:



We have reviewed rake for Spin & Go vs other similar format games offered at other sites including .com offerings and believe that our rake is overall lower than competitors by a substantial margin.

I have seen some posts questioning whether or not the rake is really what we say it is since the $1 buyin is basically $0.93 + $0.07 which gives a rake% of 7.53%. However, on the web site, the wording is ‘7% of the prize pool goes to rake’ which I think accurately describes what we are charging. We could probably discuss the best way to word this, but I don’t think that it is possible to argue that we are misleading anyone.

As for discussing whether or not the rake we are charging is the correct one for this game, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you with the standard answer, which is that we don’t discuss rake in the forums.

Availability of Spin & Gos in New Jersey

Unfortunately, I can’t comment on which games will or will not be available in jurisdictions where we may have a license in the future.

Self-exclusion from Spin & Gos

This option is indeed available. Just contact support@pokerstars.com and say that you want to be excluded from Spin & Gos, and they will disable your ability to register for them. It will not affect any of your other games. Please note that you cannot exclude for a period of time. If you want to be able to play again after self-excluding, you will just have to write a new mail to support, asking for the exclusion to be removed.

Higher buyins

This is very possible to be deployed at some point, but there is not a fixed timeline on this.

Collusion

Collusion is against our TOS and anyone who participates in this risks being banned for life and their funds confiscated. We take it very seriously and have effective methods of uncovering collusion, and catch players regularly. Whenever this happens, we distribute the funds in the accounts back to the players who we deem to have been cause harm by the colluding players.

While I do see the benefit of two players colluding in a Spin & Go, I don’t think it is a profitable endeavor for the players involved. First of all, you will are not going to meet your partner very often in a tournament with a high prize pool, and when you do, the considerable downside to being caught is really going to add un-welcomed variance to your poker career.

Most of the conversation about collusion is coming in the Heads-Up forum which is understandable as collusion is not a possibility in your main game. You might benefit from discussing with regulars of 6-max and other formats as to how collusion affects their multi-way games.

Spin & Gos are killing poker

As mentioned earlier in this post, poker is increasingly struggling to attract new players, and Spin & Gos serve exactly this purpose. I think it is much more likely that in a few years we are going to say that Spin & Gos saved online poker than Spin & Gos were responsible for killing the game.

Poker has never been about finding your niche and sticking with that for the duration of your career. If poker is your chosen profession, your adaption skills are going to be put to the test every so often, and Spin & Gos are just another thing you have to adapt to.

Influence on other Sit & Gos

In the first full week of Spin & Gos, we observed a reduction in the volume of Sit & Gos on the site. This reduction was surprisingly consistent among all games, game speeds and buyins of $60 and below. Hypers were not worse off than other game speeds, something that seems to indicate that all types of players are attracted to Spin & gos.

If we include Spin & Gos in the numbers, we find that we have a huge increase in the total number of players who are taking part in the games.

It is difficult to predict how this will look in the future, but we will obviously be keeping a close eyes on the traffic and be ready to adjust the Sit & Go offering accordingly.

Variance

Yes, there is no doubt that Spin & Gos is a game type with inherently high variance. I think it is also a fact that the reason for this variance is also what makes the game so popular among a big segment of our players.

I have seen posts suggesting a flatter payout structure, followed by an argument similar to ‘recreational players are not going to care if the top prize is $30K or $10K’. To this I can only tell you that all of our experience show that the bigger the payout, the greater the interest from the player base as a whole.

The frequency of the top payout is also important. We prominently list each large payout in the Spin & Go lobby. If the large payouts were to show up less frequently, there would be an impact on the desirability of the games.

Blind structure

The blind stricture is the same as for the regulated markets, and we feel that it is appropriate for this type of tournament. The average running time is around 5-6 minutes which is about what we aimed for before the launch.

Other Games / Betting Structures

We are not currently considering offering Spin & Gos for other games than No-Limit Hold’em. This can change, of course, but probably not in the near future.

Software issues

The launch has uncovered some bugs in the software, most of which have been in the mobile clients. We are making it a high priority to fix these bugs as we are being made aware of them, so hopefully most players will not be affected. If you do experience something that is likely to be a bug, I encourage you to contact support@pokerstars.com with a brief description of the problem and, it at all possible, an explanation on how to re-create the issue.

Seating algorithm

I will get back to you in the future regarding the seating algorithm.

Thanks,
Baard

nice to see you are considering making deals possible thank you ^^

@Baard. With regards to collusion- I don't know if you have read all of the posts ITT, but a legitimate concern is if say a stable of players are playing with a shared bankroll (which is a likely prospect for regs in such high variance games).

In this instance collusion naturally occurs without premeditation and can be decided by a solitary action from each individual without consultation.

e.g. say 2 players share 40% of their profits. One is on the button and another is in the BB. This allows the button to shove much wider REGARDLESS of BB's calling range. Thus if BB is playing "normally" he gains EV at the expense of BU and SB. However, if BU is sharing a bankroll with BB then BU is gaining as well at the expense of SB.

This sort of thing obviously cannot be avoided in all types of poker games, but I'm just pointing out that with the nature of Spin and Goes (3 handed, random seating- so you can't impose the Chinese ring ban) makes this stuff easier to get away with (although obviously it's difficult for 1 party to try to exploit this to make a profit consistently). Also with it being 3 handed the sort of edge that can be gained from this is massive.

This worries me since there will definitely be more "cheating" in this format than any other format. Although no one can gain tremendously from cheating, pretty much anyone who has some sort of staking/backing/swapping deal with someone else at the table can decide to use this information to rob equity from the 3rd guy at the table at will.
The problem won't be mass scale cheating like the Chinese DON rings a few years ago, but the problem will be large scale isolated instances of cheating from many individuals.

Not saying that Spin and Goes should be banned, but before you introduce this game at higher buy in levels, please conduct proper research into the risk reward. With smaller playing field, more regs, bigger variance (i.e. more incentive to share bankrolls etc), there will be more collusion.

please no deals....

It wil be so irritating playing an hyper turbo and people just ask for deal deal... and saying no... and people still asking....

on ftp at least everyone had to click deal to make it happend and you could ignore them

I have seen many games at the top payouts where players just frantically want to deal and not play poker. Isn't a game where you have a spin and then nobody wants to play poker kind of missing the point? This to me would favor reducing the top payouts so that people want to play poker and not just spin for a top prize and then deal. A change that would still keep high payouts but at a balancing point where players still want to compete. You could also set up the prize pool structure so that 2nd/3rd get more at those top payouts as that may help the inherent deal making issue. Resolving this issue also helps variance to a degree and seems like a pretty good compromise that resolves some issues.

Thanks Baard for the comprehensive post

I wish I shared your optimism.

Good post thanks Baard.

Spin N Gos are fantastic, the only thing that is needed is a deal button for the highest payout tiers. Cheers.

Hey I like that the games arent trackable by datamining sites...or are there? Is there a possibility that these games will be tracked in the future?

Ofc they will be trackable. Every format and every hand gets tracked by 3rd party sites (yup there are othera than SS and PTR) so why do you think those wouldnt be.

VPP goals still acheivable, just need to put in a ton more hours and win a lot less money prerakeback than you would have otherwise. Horse**** answer.

This isnt about being upset, its about being scammed. If you introduced them at the beginning of the year people would have been upset but no rational person would have said you were doing anything wrong. Having people making decisions about what games to play for 9 months and then completely blowing the ecosystem out of whack at the end of the year when you have them bent over a barrel with your rakeback system is scumbag behavior.

Youre seeing equal reduction from all games because regs are being forced to move to higher raking games because of the rakeback system you have set up. The recs moving from 6m hypers are being replaced by 9m hyper and turbo regs who now cant rake enough at their original games to make it. The recs moving from 9m hypers are being replaced by turbo and regspeed regs. So this small reduction in traffic youre trying to push is misleading. Youve completely thrown the ecosystem out of whack by introducing these at a time when most people are getting an extremely high rb%. Or should i say would have been getting since your bull**** bait and switch is gonna cause a lot of people to miss their goals.
Unforeseen events caused by "acts of god" and ones caused by the entity you had an implicit deal with are a tad different. Seriously dont know why Im wasting my time on PR mouthpiece. Get ****ed.

Dude there's three months left in the year, is Stars really supposed to pass up millions of dollars in rake just because of a few SNEs will have a harder time? FFS look at it from their perspective.

I have always found these +1 posts kind of pointless. But here we go:

+1

Saying that people would complain about the time no matter what time you launched isn't true at all, I think that's just misdirection by you.

Had you launched these in May or June, (or obviously at the beginning of 2015) I don't think a single player would have complained about the time of the launch.

And this isn't your first rodeo Baard. You know the overwhelming majority of players make late pushes to get their volume for SNE. It's not about whether you think that's optimal or not, it's about the fact that you knew the impact this would have and you knew that a huge amount of your high VIP players would be affected and apparently it didn't matter. But tbh it's really hard to mess up this bad, because even after all these problems, (the bad timing, the volume sucking for other games) we STILL wouldn't have been that mad if the game you created was ACTUALLY GRINDABLE, but (and if you've been reading these threads like you say, then you know) it has been shown that it ISN'T. So the only way to screw players over this much is the exact trifecta of what you have done which is:
1. Announce the change late
2. Sap traffic from all other games
3. Have the new game be something that isn't viable to use to supplement playing to help offset the damage you've done.

Any 2 of those things together is only mildly annoying, it takes all 3 of them together to actually make a disaster. Good job.


You can't use the argument of "poker ecosystem hero" and "this a business and it's about money" in the same argument. The fact is Stars would make more money if they deployed 18 man hypers. Traffic in some other formats would decrease, and regs would have to adapt, which is the same thing that's happening now, except 18 man hypers are a perfectly grindable game. How many of these new or previously dormant players would leave the site again if you stopped Spins? I'm guessing pretty much all of them. An overwhelming majority of them will never play anything other than Spins, so unless you're playing Spins, the only group that this helps is Stars. You're willing to lose players that have played on stars for 5 years or more and have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in rake in order to cater to players that are probably only playing Spins because it's basically a lottery and have no other interest in poker, and that will always play Spins or nothing. If new players are really going to move from Spins at some point to other games, then in theory traffic should increase in other formats because these are wholly new players, correct? Is that what happened at .es? If that doesn't happen, how far are you will to let traffic die at other games before you do something? If traffic continues to fall in other formats are you willing to pull Spins from your offerings?

I have no beef here.

You left out a very important part here is that the new recreational players want to be able to deal more than anyone! They clamor for it constantly at every big payout game. You keep saying how you want to pull new players in, but you don't give them what they want. You say you don't want to cater to one specific group of players but yet you haven't implemented the one thing that would make pretty much every rec player happy AND silence about 80% of the criticism from regs because then the game would actually be playable. And it's something that hurts no one because obviously if players don't agree then they can just refuse to deal and nothing changes. I don't know how you could possible see a downside here.

You say you've been reading this thread, and yet you just compared the rake of this game against 6 max hypers, a game that takes almost 30% longer, and yet the rake is almost exactly the same. This has been addressed numerous times ITT, (which is in the HU forum, and yet you didn't compare it to HU hypers)

Obviously.

Obviously this is a good idea.

Without a deal button, this would be the worst possible thing you could do, for the already stated reasons.


You didn't address the big concerns at all, which is that people will be able to form groups that share payouts and then will be able to play in a way that is basically impossible to detect as collusion but can still have a real impact. And plenty of 6 max regs have said this, so don't just throw it on HU regs being ignorant.

This might be the most absurd part of this post. Spins SAVING poker? Really?? At the moment you have literally no basis to make that argument. And you are basically insulting us by giving us a game that, in it's current state, is unplayable long term, and then saying, "if you're really a pro like you think you are, then man up and adapt to it, because "**** happens." I except **** like that from NVGtards but not the Stars SNG rep.

Including people playing Spins in the argument on whether Spins are decreasing traffic is lolsauce. Don't even know why you'd mention it. And I'll ask again. You said you're going to "keep a close eye on it" does this mean there is a point in which you'll remove Spins? Oh, and want to mention again that the "it's difficult to predict how this will look in the future" argument stopped you from making many other good changes, but not the one in which you can make a quick buck first.

That's it?? That's all you have to say about the worst thing about these games? After all the work people ITT and others did to show the expectations of people playing these games, you don't address ANY of it? So since fish love variance and big payouts, will we see a WTA Spin soon where 99.99% get 2x and the and the .01% get 1 mill? Do you think that would be good for the ecosystem?

Antes. Lower rake. Profit.

Why not? I'm sure the PLO guys would love to trade their raketrapped game for one that's worse.

Least of my concerns

Please do.



I would love for you to address this post before January. Thanks

Exactly, so like 3 min average time for HU hypers, 6min for 3 max Spins, and 9 min for 6 max. Rake for spins should fit somewhere nicely in the middle, and yet it's the same as it is for 6 max (and actually higher than 6 max at some stakes. How can people not see this for exactly what it is?

Good to know where you stand on backing out of implied agreements to make yourself more money.

It's not a few SNEs, their entire rakeback system is end of year heavy. Making supernova or 200k is a big deal to a lot of grinders. W/e nothing is getting changed Im just wasting time I should spend grinding and studying. Just had to say my piece.

I don't think that it's right to equate the amount of games play, and player happiness... These games are likely to be one of the most addictive formats of poker if not the most. It is this addictive nature of spin n go's coupled with marketing which appears to recreational players as a way of making up to 1000x a buy-in in minutes is likely the reason these are so attractive... Not because people are generally happy with the games although I may be wrong....



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