Unibet Announces an End to Spin & Go Style Tournaments
9 years ago
12 May
The world of online poker has recently been fighting a battle between the purely recreational players and those regulars who have spent years trying to hone their skills and advance in the game.
This week Unibethave announced that adding ‘Spin and Go’ style tourneys to their site is not going to happen in the foreseeable future – a boon for those who see the ‘lottery-type’ tournaments as the first deathknell for the skill element of poker–or the game itself.
Speaking to PokerIndustryPRO recently, Unibet’s Head of Poker Andrew West said of the popular-but-random games:
They’re definitely fun, but they’re too high variance for there to be many winners, and I think you need winners for games to have a future.”
When Winamax launched their Expresso games back in 2013, it was seen as a fun addition to traditional tournaments. Three player SNG’s with short stacks and hyper-turbo blinds reduced the skill element required, and thereby took the edge away from those who studied and practiced their poker.
In effect, they became lotteries, with very few real winners except for the sites themselves, who would eventually rake in all the money from inexperienced ‘gamblers’ attracted to the shiny new games.
When PokerStars jumped on the bandwagon with their Spin and Go games, the whole nature of the online sites started to change, with sites attracting unskilled recreational players at the expense of regulars who were actually trying to make a living at the game and move up the ranks.
The overall result of this approach was seen all too clearly late last year when PokerStars introduced sweeping changes, wreaking havoc amongst the regulars and higher-stakes players, many of whom went on strike to complain.
Unibet’s approach, therefore, is a pleasant change from the simplistic, money-making approach of other sites who followed the trend. West expanded on his thoughts by adding:
At some stage, a feature becomes industry standard and you lose players by not having it. I don’t think that’s where Expresso-like games are yet, and I don’t think they’ll get there any time soon.”
He continued, "They’re also vulnerable to third party software granting huge edges,” a comment no doubt harking back to last week’s revelation that thousands of PokerStars players had received surprise refunds (although no real explanations as per usual). It is plausible that the lottery-style Spin and Go’s having been subject to some unspecified cheating methods along the way.
The general consensus is that despite the efforts to track down and remove bots, colluders, and other unsavory elements in the game, Spin and Go’s are rife with data-mining and bots, and give certain players a huge edge over fellow competitors – exactly the type of ‘abuse’ which Stars had stuck at the forefront of their highly controversial changes last year. It seems little has changed in some respects.
West himself is a regular contributor on the 2+2 forums – a hot-bed of poker gossip and opinion, with many posters being seasoned poker-players well-worth listening to in such matters.
It’s the biggest poker community in the world, and it’s got a wide range of player types…It’s valuable to be well known and (mostly) well respected there,” stated West, adding, “It’s also valuable to get good feedback on features, bugs, promotions, etc. We use it a lot to learn how to replicate bugs that have slipped through, or to fine-tune future promotions.”
West also expressed his view that the term ‘casual’ player need not mean ‘newbie’ or ‘fish’ at all, claiming:
I think that when people say “casual player” they are thinking of just a bad (or even stupid) player. But plenty of people play poker because it’s fun, and they like talking to other people with the same idea. Lots of people on 2+2 who used to take the game more seriously are now at that stage of their poker career.”
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