PokerStars has announced that live Spin & Go tournaments will return at the upcoming European Poker Tour (EPT) stop in Barcelona, where Spin & Go Championship Live will take place from August 30-31.
Spin & Go tournaments are fast, short-handed games with randomized prizes awarded via a random-number-generator (RNG). They’ve been a staple online game at PokerStars for over a decade, designed to cater to tournament players looking for the possibility of a big win, without the time to commit to multi-table tournaments.
Other operators offer their own variants — most notably Winamax, which is credited with originating the idea with its Expresso games — but so far only PokerStars has brought the game out from behind the screen and into the real world.
That happened at last December’s EPT Prague festival, where the first ever live Spin & Go event was won by Carlos Gurdiel. As we wrote at the time, the idea was actually first tested in Barcelona, before being refined in time for a full-on running in Prague.
Now it returns to the Spanish city, fully formed and offering a €275,000 guaranteed prize pool, with a top prize of €100,000.
Qualification opens June 23
Much as in Prague, the event will be restricted to 81 entrants for reasons of tournament structure: as with a shootout tournament, the winner of each three-handed table will progress to the next round, so the field must be balanced.
Qualification will take place online across various PokerStars regions from June 23 to August 3. PokerStars has also confirmed that a number of special guests will be included in the line-up.
We’ll be bringing you more details on how the Spin & Go Championship Live will work in the coming weeks.
Tweaks introduced to online games
News of the live event comes in the same week that PokerStars made some tweaks to the version of the game currently available online.
From June 6, the Spin & Go Flash format has been retired, with a key element from the variant incorporated into the main Spin & Go structure.
The tweak involves the speed of the game, with bigger prize multipliers leading to longer levels and bigger starting stacks, while smaller prizes keep things very fast with small stacks and super-quick levels of only a minute.
The maximum multiplier available in a Spin & Go is currently x12,000 for buy-ins up to $100, x4,800 for $250 buy-ins, x2,400 for $500 and x1,200 for $1,000. $5 Spin & Go’s have a x240,000 maximum multiplier, promoting a million-dollar first prize.
The changes apply to both hold’em and Omaha versions of Spin & Go tournaments.
Featured image courtesy of Danny Maxwell/Rational Intellectual Holdings Ltd.
