The secret is out: Lottery Sit and Gos are popular. They caught on quickly when they were introduced by Winamaxin July 2013, again when they were launched by iPoker earlier this year, and yet again when Full Tiltand PokerStars.es got on board more recently. But they officially hit the prime time when PokerStarsrolled out its version, Spin and Go, on its dot-com site just a couple of weeks ago. And boy, have the players lapped it up.

To review, Spin and Gos are three-handed, hyper-turbo sit and gos in which each player starts with 500 chips. Rather than having a standard prize pool comprised of the sum of the buy-ins, the prize pool is randomly determined based on preset probabilities and not announced until the game starts.

Almost three-quarters of the time, the prize pool will be 2x the buy-in, but it can be 4x, 6x, 10x, 25x, 100x, 200x, and even 1,000x, hence the “Lottery” designation. The chances of hitting anything over 4x the buy-in is very low, though; the top three prize tiers have just a three-hundreths of a percent chance of hitting… combined.

Spin and Gos were clearly designed with the casual player in mind. They are quick, which prevents boredom. Their small starting stacks and rapidly escalating blinds reduce the effect of skill on the outcome, thus leveling the playing field and making the games more attractive to recreational players.

Results have shown them to have made a significant impact on Stars. According to PokerScout in its weekly Scouting Report, during the first week Spin and Gos were introduced, cash game traffic on PokerStars decreased 9.2%, almost certainly from players hopping on the Spin and Go train.

PokerScout took it a step farther when looking at the influence of Spin and Gos. Because PokerStars saw its traffic rise 2.5% at the same time last year, PokerScout figures that Spin and Gos have actually taken away 12% to 16% of the site’s cash game traffic.

On the whole, it appears that people like Lottery Sit and Gos. Opinion has seemed to be generally positive to neutral in the poker community as well. While these high-variance games are not everyone’s cup of tea, many appreciate the fun of the new game type and like that Stars and other sites are coming up with new ideas.

There is one group of players, though, that is not happy at all with the advent of Lottery Sit and Gos: high-volume grinders. These players see the Spin and Go as a threat to their livelihood, as they feel that recreational players are not only moving away from cash games and into Spin and Gos, but also away from certain sit and gos.

One player in particular is trying to do something about it. masuronike, the founder of Tiltbook and a Supernova Elite member on PokerStars, is urging players to e-mail a petition to PokerStars asking the site to eliminate Spin and Gos or at least alter them to make them less attractive to casual players.

In a post, he wrote, “The fact that you can theoretically win a thousand buy-ins in a span of minutes makes the format extremely exciting and addictive for recreational players. That looks like a great thing at first glance and should make the game potentially very profitable for regulars and skilled players. The reality is that the actual profit of even the best and most skillful players will be affected by sheer luck… Most of your winnings will be determined by how lucky you’ll be in hitting and, of course, winning the games with 100+ buy-ins.”

He then explained that it is close to a mathematical impossibility to spin one of the top three prize pool tiers, let alone win one. Showing the math, he calculated that if a player dominated $30 Spin and Gos to the tune of making the money 36% of the time, but did not hit a single 100x, 200x, or 1,000x prize pool in 100,000 chances, he would only profit $1,168.

He went on to say that Spin and Gos “may ruin the whole ecosystem of online poker, as it might be very compelling for a recreational player to play a game that potentially offers a $30,000 win just minutes after paying the $30 buy-in.” There will be little incentive, masuronike believed, for a casual player to participate in other game formats that offer less potential money and take longer to play.

Alternatively, he created another petition for those who like Spin and Gos, but would prefer the prize pool distribution to top out at 100x to make them less attractive to recreational players.

What do you think of the Spin and Go format? Leave a comment here and let us know.

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