Winamax Launches New High-speed SNG Variant

Written by: Tight Poker Staff August 21, 2013 Affiliate Disclaimer

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Winamax, one of the leading providers of online poker services in France, recently launched a brand new variant of online poker—a high-speed Sit ‘N’ Go format that successfully blends lottery and poker.

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Interested players only have to visit the Winamax gaming lobby and hit the Expresso tab, which is located in the sidebar. Players then have to select a buy-in as the game is available for buy-ins ranging from $1 to $10. Once players have done this, they will be entered into a three-handed Sit ‘N’ Go hyper-turbo format, in which the winner takes the entire prize. The game lasts just a few minutes.

Players might wonder if there is anything unique or innovative about this variant. The most attractive feature of this variant is that any one of nine prize pools is randomly assigned to it. These prize pools range from anywhere between double the size of the buy-in to as much as 1000 times the buy-in. For instance, players who buy-in for €10 will be playing for a prize as large as €10,000.

The idea of randomly assigning prize pool multipliers to tournaments is not new, as players of PokerStars’ Golden SNG’s will very well know. The difference between PokerStars’ Golden SNG’s and Winamax’s Expresso is that PokerStars simply added a bonus multiplier prize to an existing prize pool. Besides, Expresso is not a temporary promo at Winamax; the online poker room intends it to be a permanent feature

An Expresso player will be playing against two other players for just x2 of the buy-in for more than 75 percent of the time, while players will be playing for x4 the buy-in for around 15 percent of the time. The prize pool becomes around x20 the buy-in or more for just 1 percent of the time, while the tournament gets assigned the huge jackpot of x1000 the buy-in for just 5 out of 100,000 times.

Besides, the buy-in has nothing much to do with the rake, but is closely associated with the payout table. According to the payout table, €2.79 is the average prize players can expect for a tournament with €1 buy-in. The entry fee for 3 players is €1, which makes the rake for each tournament 7 percent or €0.021.

Although players may feel that it is too high a rake for a hyper-turbo format, this is quite normal in the heavily regulated French gaming industry, where the tax rate is enormous.