PKR Launches Lottery Sit-and-Go’s
From the “it’s about damn time” file, independent online poker room PKR.com has finally launched its version of the ever-popular Lottery Sit-and-Go, called…wait for it…Jackpot Sit-and-Go. I mean, there are only so many different names one can invent for these things.
Jackpot Sit-and-Go’s are three-handed, hyper-turbo, short-stacked Sit-and-Go’s. You know, just like any other Sit-and-Go, except the table is tiny, you get almost no chips, and the blinds are quickly equal to your stack. Aside from that, the big difference between these are regular Sit-and-Go’s is that players do not know what the prizes will be until the game starts.
If you’ve never read my billionteen articles about Jackpot Sit-and-Go’s, you may be thinking to yourself, “But it’s a Sit-and-Go. Everyone always knows the payout structure ahead of time. Like if it’s ten-handed, the winner takes half the prize pool, second place wins 30 percent, and third place wins 20 percent.”
I KNOW, RIGHT? You’d like to think that, but you’d be wrong. In a Jackpot Sit-and-Go, the prize pool can vary from as little as twice the buy-in to, in PKR’s version, as much as 1,000 times the buy-in. The prize pool multiplier for any individual tournament is determined randomly, according to a pre-set probability table. After all three players are registered and the game is about to begin, the site’s random number generator does its thing and spits out the prize pool for which the players will be fighting.
As there are only three people at the table, it is going to be winner-take-all most of the time. To reduce stress levels, though, PKR awards all three players a piece of the pie for any of the top three prize pools. Let’s take a look at the prize pool multipliers and their related probabilities, according to PKR.com:
2x multiplier – 15,432 in 20,000
4x multiplier – 2,909 in 20,000
6x multiplier – 1,450 in 20,000
10x multiplier – 180 in 20,000
30x multiplier – 15 in 20,000
100x multiplier – 8 in 20,000
250x multiplier – 5 in 20,000
1,000x multiplier – 1 in 20,000
As you can see, the majority of the time – about 77 percent – the prize pool will only be twice the buy-in and it will be winner-take-all. As the prize pool multipliers increase, the chances of hitting them quickly bottom out: there is a 99 percent chance that the prize pool will be six times the buy-in or less. Yes, there is a chance to score big, but the odds are low, hence the “lottery” moniker for these sorts of things.
As mentioned, at the top three multiplier slots, everyone gets paid. In those lucky situations, the winner receives 83.33 percent of the prize pool, second place gets 10 percent, and third place nabs 6.67 percent.
As PKR is completely geared towards recreational players, it has kept the buy-ins for Jackpot Sit-and-Go’s quite low: $0.30, $1.50, $6 or $12. PKR has also made things easier than have other online poker rooms, keeping the multiplier probabilities constant across all buy-in levels. Rake does change slightly as buy-ins increase, though. For the $0.30 and $1.50 Jackpot Sit-and-Go’s, the rake is 7.15 percent, whereas for the $6 and $12 levels, it is 6.2 percent.
So, that’s it. Jackpot Sit-and-Go’s on PKR. Low buy-ins, pie-in-the-sky dreams of big prizes.
Wait, that’s actually not it. One more thing. PKR has also launched a promotion in conjunction with Jackpot Sit-and-Go’s, called Streaks. It is pretty simple. Players try to rack up as long of a streak of Jackpot Sit-and-Go wins as they can. The top 50 players on the leader board at the end of the promotional period win Jackpot Sit-and-Go tickets.
For the purposes of the contest, a streak counts as consecutive Jackpot Sit-and-Go wins at the same buy-in level. Players can jump around to different buy-ins, but winning a $12 game after a $6 game does not make a streak. It does sound, though, like winning a $12 then $6 then $12 then $6 would actually create two separate two-game streaks. At the end of the promotion, the person with the longest streak will receive 50 Jackpot Sit-and-Go tickets. Second place will receive 30, while the third and fourth place finishers will get 20. Awards go down to three tickets for 50th place. The value of the tickets are determined by the buy-in level at which the streak was accomplished.
The one dumb thing about the Streaks promotion is that it requires a pointless “Opt-In,” as if there would be players who would choose to play Jackpot Sit-and-Go’s yet not try to have their wins count towards the leader board. But as it is, players must fill out an opt-in form on the PKR website before they start the contest. The promotion runs from 16:00 GMT today through 23:59 GMT September 6th.
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