Hello, Im spanish so I have acess to pokerstars.es obviously. Recently, they introduced a new format in pokerstars.es (which that most likely they are testing it before introducing it in .com), that is in essence 3man 25bb hyper SNGS. This will obviously steal a LOT of traffic from HU HYPERS if introduced and popular (probably only done on lower stakes?)

The interesting part, though, is that it is based in a jackpot system. Every sng you play, you can earn from 1x the prizepool (which is 2 buy ins) to 1000x buy ins. The way it works, every SNG you play, you invest one buy in into the jackpot that you can potentially earn back with volume in the future.

I'm not sure if this format is genius or a huge mistake yet. Obviously this is a insane way of attracting fish. But what worries me if this format is really profitable, and almost seems they want to remove regs out of the equation...

Quoting porkerfuse "At the start of the tournament, the prize pool is randomly selected. 75% of the time, the prize will just be double the buyin. 15% of the time, the prize pool is four times the buy-in. The big prizes are a lot less frequent—a 200x prize occurs five times in 100,000; The jackpot—1000x the buyin—occurs four times in 100,000"

So imagine investing 2-3 years worth of volume, to have 4x spin and gos with 1000x multiplier... the variance is way too ridiculous in real timeframes of time imo.

This seems to be what poker is going into the future, I thought it was a good idea, until I realized how stupidly varianceish is for any reg who would want to profit at these. They basically have "battlenet" system aswell. Which makes it inviable at higher stakes too.

I dont mind to prepare for a new format that could potentially outcrown hu hypers, it s always exciting to keep growing as a player and challenge urself in formats thet help the poker ecosystem keep healthier. We all benefit from this. But i'm afraid this format is not reg-friendly because of the stupid volume/time invested you need to realize your equity. Also, the rake on .es is 7% but thats on a spanish higher raked site and very lower stakes, so not sure if that'd be the final rake on higher stakes (doubt very much). Though, if they make this format enough profitable for regs (similar to HU hypers) in a healthy system, I do think its ***** genius, for attracting fish at least.

I dont even know if people will be interested in this but I think its something most of us HU hyper regs should be worried to say the least, and some discussion would be nice!

i think similar sngs are on ipoker, you basically pay double the rake, and the second part of the rake goes towards the jackpot. Don't think its good for regs, and I think they don't play it much, it's amazing for the fish tho. Would rather not see this format, but oh well, this is the way poker has been going - more into gambling area.

They have these on full tilt already called "Jackpot sit and goes". Personally i think the increasing gimmicky path the game is going down is not good for the game long term but what do i know.

If my head math is right it seems there is a massive hidden rake.

If you play 100000 games there have been 300000 buy ins put up, but on average only 215000 buy ins paid out. That is am almost 33% rake hidden in the structure.

Really the jackpot payouts need top happen way way more frequently

On Full Tilt it is 5% rake.

http://www.pokerwinners.com/news/ind...kpot-sit-n-gos

seems like there are other jackpots too, not only one. So your calculation is not right here!

2000x

500x

100x

Atleast fulltilt does have 3 different ones

do you need to win the sng to have a % of the jackpot?

cant imagine how tilting it would be to play a 1000x one only to lose it...

Seems like something that would attract fishes away from other formats and leave more regs battling each other, I doubt that many regs would want to deal with the huge variance.

If the rake is too high to be viable and this becomes popular, then the most effective thing to do would be to lobby hard and loud. That remains to be seen (the FTP ones aren't stealing away HUSNG action, are they?).

I think this thread is a good starting point to discussions. The variance part isn't nearly as concerning as is the rake part, at least to me.

The game selection part can probably be dealt with to an extent as well, depending how exactly it works.

On the plus side, the ability and desire to add new game formats is great. Imagine if FTP never added hyper turbo HUSNGs? I've long felt that as long as new formats were experimented with, the whole "games could die" thing would never happen. A single format can get stale... too beatable by too many humans or even bots... but new, well designed formats should keep everything moving nicely over time.

If you offer casino games, what pokerstars will do in the future, those jackpot sng could be a nice entry point for casino players to switch to poker.
If you swap with plenty of players it might not be a bad thing.

There is already a discussion in the STT forum:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/36...l#post43887802

This is how it works exactly:

One thing important to note is that its not winner takes all at the higher payouts, I know the x1000 at least guarentees 3rd for 10%. Also on FT at least deals can be made.

Its not the adding new games that i think is damaging long term. I totally agree with you that its good that the big sites deliver what the players want. For me the issue is how the game is increasingly being promoted. There seems to be very little promotion these days of the game of poker, sites seem to opt instead to market the game from a pure gambling perspective. If thats what works to get deposits then fine but with that i feel there comes a risk that eventually the winning aspect of the game could be lost. With out the sites needing to rely on poker being a beatable skill game for marketing the higher the likely hood that unbeatable games become prevelant.

It doesn't look good...

I didn't like the direction pokerstars took with their all-in shootout freerolls some time back.

I hate this

I loooove the idea of 3max hypers though... If rake is good u could afford to play regs much more than now at 2max hypers, which is plain awesome (like 2regs/1fish table wud be profitable). Also most likely a lot of inferior regs in HU from 6max/9max wud surely play.

The problem is the jackpot being too hardcore. I think 3max provides a whole new world of possibilities which most of us hyper regs will benefit. But only if done right, which doesnt seem to be the case so far.

The first super turbo HUSNGs on FTP were like 10-15 bb deep and had higher rake.

Many complained, including casual players, and they fixed the structure to what you see today.

When these are introduced on .com, lets analyze the rake and potential profitability and go from there.

We can lean on some of our community members that can analyze these types of things more analytically than us just saying "1000x is too much variance." We should see some calculations with good logic behind them on all these topics before reaching any hard conclusions.

On the rake front, it's difficult to peg rake until we see it on .com. Regulated countries (.fr is brought up most) have far higher rakes.

I don't like the look of this. Do we really want to play this game for hundreds of hours? Why not play and improve NL full ring and 6 max instead...

HU action on FTP hasn't been amazing for a long time, but since the introduction of these jackpot sngs I do believe it has become worse. However I have also seen a random bink a nice jackpot and proceed to come try out HUsngs (for the first time, I think). I think these will be okay, and can add variety to the game for the recreational, and I'm sure after 1 tabling spin and goes for an hour and getting 7/8 2x prize pools in a row, a lot will return to hypers anyway.

Furthermore, on ftp I know of a few individuals who have been grinding these to determine profitability and played a few k games already, even at the $10 level they have shown to be extremely profitable, with one such friend making ~$1/game pre rakeback without any of the top 3 prizes being hit at all. So these may definitely have potential to be a new, alternative game on stars where regs can grind out a decent w/r if this becomes their game of choice.

Finally, wrt battlenet registering it's my experience on FTP that the sheer volume of fish playing them far outweighs the regs to a degree where even at times where I know I'm playing them with 3/4 of my friends, I almost never meet them at the tables because there are so many games running. This is at ftp which is often criticised for having a poor reg to rec ratio, and I honestly cannot imagine the # of spin and go sngs that will run on stars simultaneously!

Gl gl, give these a chance before doomsday predictions imo

I assume people are worried about the b.net style for high stakes, not micro/low. I doubt there would be nearly enough recreationals for the number of regs, but who knows.

yeah, as a higher stakes player that makes me sad... battlenet lobby for this format wont be profitable and will probably turn into RB pros like 6max, which kinda sucks and neglects the initial benefits of being able to play more regs and be profitable pre RB, unlike husng hypers. If the ratio was kept -at least- 2fish/1reg per table, with ocasional 2fish/1reg and ocasional 3reg tables, it would definitely work... but im afraid it will be 3reg/2reg-1fish m ost of the time at highstakes obviously. (If ever exist)

And those who think these (if popular and introduced across many buy ins), wont steal traffic from HU Hypers, then you have gone nuts. Probs will steal a lot from 6max hypers and 2max together, they could have pretty crazy volume. I think its very amazing format for fish to play honestly. Dont see why they would play 2max or 6max again.

Wall of txt coming up so tl:dr = recs won't get dipshyte out of this and it won't last on .com site is my 2cents.

First off I'm no math wizard so anything and everythigng I say I will happily take back if someone smarter than me can prove me wrong, but given the fact that recs play a much smaller volume compared to regs, their chances of hitting that JP are obviously much smaller for any single person than compared to any reg grinding them. On top of that even when assuming there will be some sort of split options in the higher tier JPs , on the lower levels it will just result in a rec playing them over and over, loosing a lot more than in HTHU because they'll be playing vs multiple regs a lot and even when playing reg-rec-rec or god help us that happens rec-rec-rec they'll obviosuly be at a disadvantage. So even when hitting some shyte tier JP their chances of actually winning the sng are too small and they'll be losing money much faster than in HU. Of course there will be plenty of degens around that would play these like slotmachines, but overall that number should be rather small on a site like ps.com since everyones is solid now and regs (and recs that have at least some sort of understanding of the HTHU format) will always outweigh the degens. So basically I don't think there is any money in it for anyone but maybe regs that just massgrind them, profiting from a high winrate in the ones that actually spin a higher prizepool. That again is yet to be determined by the rake and final payout structures.

From what I understand the rake in HTHU on other sites (like the .es one) is so terribly high that there is no HTHU regs around so it's mostly recs / 6max grinders playin these now? (Someone correct me if that is completely wrong lol)

So yeah I agree that it might attract a certain player group for a while but in the end they'll lose out so much on it that they just won't find it appealing :S

And if we talk higher stakes, what's the chances that they'll attract new recs to play a format where they before were at a horrible disadvantage against one reg and now have to face 2 of them at once?

And what's the chances me that 2 regs in let's say a certain "group" of players would go ahead and split a 4/1000 JP with a rec...they'd make freshly fried fish filets out of that guy and split money later is more likely imho.

So yeah in conclusion, I doubt it'll be a format overall appealing to non-regs and regs will probably end up paying the rake...

But who knows, maybe I'm wrong and this will become a thing real quick? I guess it can't really be decided before the actual structures for the .com version are announced but until then I'm sceptical against the concept of introducing "JP" systems on ps.com.

this is an interesting development indeed

Just as an example to my post, opened the Full Tilt client and this is the pop up i am greeted with.

[IMG][/IMG]

The same format was introduced to ipoker a few month before FTP and after the introduction the hyper (called Super Turbo at ipoker with a little different format) HU SNGs

1. were running less
2. the competition was "harder" (means less fish but most regs stayed as far as I could judge)

As a side effect I found the 20&30€ limits afterwards as hard as the 10€ ones. I have no sample on this one (at least not big enough) but since the jackpot sngs are running from 1 to 10€ it is highly likely that HU sngs of the same buyin type are losing massive amounts of fish. Before the jackpot sngs the 10€ were way better then the 20€ upwards. Can`t tell if this changed since the beginning because I don`t play there that much lately



PS: The jackpot SNGs were easier to beat than the HU sngs at the time when they were introduced...with a decent rb deal it`s very nice imo

its pretty normal when you have 2 poker skins (stars and ftp), that you dont want to market them both to the same audience. stars has always had a very "professional" vibe to it, while ftp was always a bit more gambly.