PokerStars has rolled out Tetris + Spin & Go, a temporary takeover of their ultra-popular lottery sit and go game with a new theme and a lucrative new promotion for players.
F5poker first revealed that PokerStars was working on such a promotion back in September 2020. On Monday, it deployed globally on most licenses on the global dot-com pool as well as on France and Spain, part of the European shared liquidity network.
The Spin and Go lobby in the client has been redesigned with a Tetris aesthetic, as have the tables. The game itself remains unchanged—fast, winner-takes-all sit and gos with a random top prize.
What is new is the promotion on top: Tetris-themed leader boards. While the mechanics are fairly complicated—it involves Line Clears, Levels and Game Scores—it boils down to daily player rankings where cash prizes are given out to the highest volume players.
For players that fall outside the cash prizes, the operator has a $5000 daily prize draw for players that finished in the top 500.
In total, the operator says that over $1.5 million will be paid out in the dot-com market and almost as much—€1 million—in the Southern European market from now until the end of March. This works out at over $33,000 daily in dot-com, and €23,000 in Southern Europe.
It appears to replace the previous long-running Spin & Go 20 and 50 leader boards. This had given away just over $20,000 a day and had run throughout much of 2020.
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Verified players can continue to play a real-money game, such as Flip & Go and Spin & Gold, for free each and every day.One of the most popular promotions for low stakes players on GGPoker has been further expanded.
During the software update on February 10, the Daily Free Spin promotion changed to Daily Freebie. Furthermore, UK players can now also claim the daily gift for a chance to boost their bankrolls.
All players, both existing and new, just need to have verified accounts and log in each day to claim their gift, which lets plays play real money tournaments—and compete for real money cash prizes.
The update has expanded what is given away. Now, there are Daily Freebie tickets for Flip & Go, the super-successful new format introduced in January 2021. It has also undergone some changes since its launch, with GGPoker increasing the frequency and adjusting the buy-ins as well as the maximum number of stacks for purchase.
“GGPoker is happy to confirm that we’ve relaunched our Daily Free Spin offer as the Daily Freebie; verified players can continue to play a real-money game, such as Flip & Go and Spin & Gold, for free each and every day. All they need to do is log in and claim their daily reward!” said Paul Burke, Head of Public Relations at GGPoker.
“We hope to continue to change up the rewards on offer in the future, giving all players the opportunity to try out GGPoker’s most exciting games, no matter their bankroll.”
For existing players, Daily Freebie is available immediately—just log in and claim.
If you haven’t yet signed up, you can do so today and enjoy the promotion as soon as you have verified your account. You can also take advantage of all of GGPoker’s generous welcome bonuses.
How the GGPoker Daily Freebie Promotion Works
The operator has seen unprecedented growth in 2020 to become one of the leading online poker platforms for tournaments and cash games. GGPoker has achieved that with a plethora of promotions, innovations, and high-profile partnerships. Their continued success has led to a record $7.5 million in promotions given away in February 2021.
One of several promotions for players with smaller bankrolls is the Daily Freebie formerly the Daily Free Spin.
This was launched on September 7, 2020. It has given verified players the opportunity to claim one $0.25 Spin & Gold ticket every day ever since. The free ticket courtesy of GGPoker continues to be available under the new name three times per week—*but this rotates with other ticket types.*
Players can see the next six upcoming Daily Freebies listed under the “My Promo” tab. A new daily gift becomes available after each daily reset at midnight Pacific time. Each ticket will continue to feature an expiration date of 24 hours once the Daily Freebie has been awarded.
The current rotation of Daily Freebie is fixed for the time being. However, GGPoker hopes “to change the daily prizes on a semi-regular basis,” according to Burke. He also hinted at a strong possibility that the Daily Freebie will include the alternative currencies C$ or T$ sometime soon.
Newly included as a prize in the Daily Freebie is a $1 Spin & Gold ticket, which can be claimed once per week. Furthermore, five $0.05 Flip & Go tickets are up for grabs three times per week, giving players the chance at trying the new tournament format free of charge.
As a mixture between a Flipout and regular tournament, Flip & Go was launched on January 12, 2021. However, it only took a few days for the first tweaks to be made. Initially slated to take place once every hour, it was soon increased to once every 30 minutes.
The buy-ins were also adjusted and the lowest available stake was increased to $0.05 with a guarantee of $50. Players can now take a shot at their own leisure three times per week and enter this lowest tier with five stacks thanks to the Daily Freebie.
Upon launch, the Flip & Go featured a maximum of 10 entries for each of the four stakes. However, that number has been adjusted recently and the stacks for purchase are now capped at a maximum of eight. This makes the bonus stacks based on the holdings during the Flipout stage more valuable in comparison.
The overall feedback for the new tournament format has been very positive, as outlined by Burke.
“Players love it! We have been very pleasantly surprised by the positivity seen across almost all feedback, of course not all players are interested in a new game type but those who have tried it have mostly good things to say about Flip & Go. We’ve also received some constructive criticism, which is also valuable.”
Further tweaks to the Flip & Go format may very well possible, as GGPoker is constantly reviewing and optimizing its schedule. One such adjustment was made with the expansion of the popular Daily GGMasters earlier in February.
The changes to the Daily Freebie promotion went live on February 10. All verified GGPoker players in eligible countries can claim their daily gift under the “My Promo” tab after each daily reset.
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We recap some stories you may have missed including a huge PKO event and how much of himself is Landon Tice playing for?
KidPoker vs the Poker Brat?
We hinted at it last week and now it seems confirmed that Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth will play heads-up.
Given both men are traditionally live players it seems inevitable that it will be face to face and streamed on PokerGO.
The early betting markets have suggested Hellmuth is the favourite, which seems ludicrous given how much Negreanu improved in his heads-up challenge against Doug Polk.
Happy to play anyone on @PokerGo App’s “High Stakes Duel.” Looks like they are bringing me the GREAT Daniel Negreanu @RealKidPoker, the guy that studied heads up for months w coaches I respect, so be it. It will be a great challenge for me! Hoping I don’t look like THIS photo!! pic.twitter.com/EpE1BqRMWP
— phil_hellmuth (@phil_hellmuth) February 13, 2021
Tice has skin in the game
The other big heads-up match in the works is Landon Tice vs Bill Perkins, and it has been the subject of a lot of debate this last week.
Namely, how much does the poker wunderkind Landon Tice have invested in himself? Rumours circulated that he is playing for just 10% of himself in this challenge where he is already paying Bill Perkins $720,000 to play.
Tice confirmed that he has sold a lot of action for this event but while his percentage is low, it still means he has a lot of his net worth on the line:
Let me make something clear that I'm sure everyone cares about regarding my challenge with @bp22 I'm selling a lot of action for it. A lot.I'm not rolled to battle at nosebleeds. However, I am putting a very large amount of my relative net worth on myself winning it.
— Landon (@LandonTice) February 11, 2021
MicroMillions the biggest PKO ever?
The MicroMillions Main Event was a PKO for the first time in its history and it (probably) automatically became the biggest field ever for a progressive knockout tournament.
49,487 entries for the $22 Main Event, which was not quite enough to hit the $1 million guarantee.
It did lead to one player bagging almost $60,000 for their troubles including $18,651.13 in bounties alone:
The final table
Table stakes only
OK, so this week's meme classic from Reddit beats all those 'toilet roll poker home game' jokes from last year:
When Polaks Play Poker from r/poker
Will we see Hellmuth vs Negreanu heads-up? Let us know in the comments:
Barry Carter
Barry Carter is the editor of PokerStrategy.com and the co-author of The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2, Poker Satellite Strategy and PKO Poker Strategy
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In the nearly two decades since poker experienced a boom thanks to Chris Moneymaker’s historic World Series of Poker main event victory in 2003, the strategy surrounding the game has evolved at a pace never before seen. With online poker, the game’s best players were able to see more hands quickly and develop more complex strategies to win. Bet sizing, aggression levels, and even something as basic as preflop hand selection has changed drastically since the game went mainstream.
Chicago native and Southern California resident Ping Liu has been playing long enough to see most of these changes. With his first significant cash as a pro coming back in 2011 and experience playing online before that, Liu emerged as a true force in 2018 as a contender for the World Poker Tour Player of the Year title. Not only did he finish fourth in the Five Diamond World Poker Classic for $599,147, but he also took fourth in the Rolling Thunder main event for another $97,510, and fifth in the bestbet Bounty Scramble for another $73,734.
Last year, Liu picked up a win at the LA Poker Classic, while also final tabling the $10,000 super turbo bounty event at the WSOP and finishing third in the WSOP Circuit Planet Hollywood main event. He now has $2.1 million in career tournament earnings, and is currently accepting students for poker coaching and can found on Twitter @PingDotCom.
Liu sat down with Card Player to break down a couple hands from the 2007 WPT Borgata Poker Open main event final table, which featured Mike Matusow, Eugene Todd, Mark Weitzman, Haralabos Voulgaris, and eventual winner Roy Winston.
The Action: Roy Winston raised to 230,000 on the button and Mark Weitzman called out of the big blind. On the flop, Weitzman led out for 400,000 and Winston raised to 1,400,000. Weitzman folded.
Steve Schult: Before we even get into the hand itself, the first thing I noticed is the ante size. The blinds are 40,000-80,000, but the ante is just 5,000, meaning there is 30,000 in the middle in antes at the six-handed final table. Nearly all poker tournaments now use the big blind ante, which would put 80,000 in antes in the middle. So how should the ante size dictate your preflop hand selection?
Ping Liu: It’s pretty simple, intuitively, that if there is less dead money in the pot preflop, then you have less to win by raising and trying to steal the blinds. Therefore, you are less incentivized to voluntarily put money in the pot, and because of that, you will be opening slightly tighter ranges.
SS: Should it affect how large or small you raise? In this hand, Winston raises on the button to 230,000 and nowadays you would see something between 160,000 and 200,000 in this spot.
PL: If there is less money in the middle, your raise size should go down as well. If there is less in the middle, and you’re still raising three times the blind, you’re risking more to win less. So, it’s kind of similar preflop where you can just think of what you’re raising by a percentage of the pot.
Let’s say you were in a cash game and the blinds were $1-$2 and you’re raising 2.5 big blinds to $5. That is 62.5% of the pot. And obviously with more dead money in the middle, 60% of the pot gets bigger and bigger effectively. The bigger the antes, the more you should be raising preflop, because you stand to win more if you take the blinds down right away.
That being said, back in the day, people really did raise close to 3x as the standard and I’m not really sure why that was. And I think over the years, preflop raise sizes just started getting smaller and smaller all the way down to just a min-raise, which I think started happening around 2014.
SS: Winston raises to 230,000 and Mark Weitzman calls out of the big blind. Weitzman started the hand with 1.75 million, or about 23 big blinds. I remember a mantra from this time period with regard to stack sizes which generally said that with around 10 big blinds you should be open-shoving and with about 20, you should find spots to just three-bet shove your stack. Should Weitzman have much of a flatting range?
PL: The first thing is that you’re right that 13 years ago, people usually played 20-big blind stacks a lot more like you described. They would just shove over an open. But over the years, [we have realized] there is still a lot more play anywhere between 10- and 20-big blind stacks. You can flat and take your hand post-flop.
But that is also a function of what we were talking about before. If someone is min-raising, and you have 20 big blinds in the big blind, you can still defend and have a decent amount of playability. But when people are opening to 3x, and now you have to call two additional big blinds instead of one, it does make a big difference.
Once they start tripling the blind, your risk/reward for just shoving becomes a lot better. If they fold pre to your jam, you’re going to win another big blind plus what’s in the middle. I think there has been more play post-flop recently at the shorter stack sizes, but that’s also a function of the raise sizes preflop going down.
SS: Weitzman calls and the flop comes jack-high with two clubs. He then donk-bets (betting from out of position into the aggressor) for 400,000. Can you explain the rationale of why you would want to donk-bet?
PL: The rationale behind donk-betting is that you connected with that particular flop stronger than your opponent did. You’re saying that you have the range advantage on that board. Usually, if someone is the preflop raiser, you are going to have the strongest hands in your range. You’ll have A-A, K-K, Q-Q, A-K. And if you just flat the raise preflop, then those hands aren’t going to be present in your range because you most likely would’ve put in a three-bet.
So very often, the player who defends from the big blind, won’t have a big hand. Because the top of their range isn’t going to be present. There are certain, pretty specific board textures, where the big blind theoretically could have a range advantage, but those are going to be on the lower board textures.
Something like 4-5-6 with a flush draw. That’s a board where it is more theoretically optimal to construct a donk-leading range out of the big blind, because you’ll have a lot more of the 4-5’s, the 4-6’s, the 5-6’s, and also more straight combos than the button. The button probably isn’t raising 4-6 offsuit, but from the big blind, you could defend it.
In terms of what I actually think he’s doing here, I would guess that he just has a hand that he is looking to go with at this point. He’s just trying to protect it and take the pot down right away.
SS: How have you seen the donk-bet strategy change throughout the years? Is there more or less of it now than when you started posting results a decade ago?
PL: I do think the amount of donk-betting has gone down over the years quite substantially. Most moderately studied players know that when you defend out of the big blind, the most common play is to check to the preflop raiser and then react accordingly.
That’s something that all the solvers have proven. Checking your range is going to be the best play. Back then in the pre-solver era, people didn’t understand how ranges interacted and they just started donking on boards where they shouldn’t have a leading range on it.
The main problem with doing that is it turns your hand face up. Let’s say you’re playing with a relatively weak player and they donk on this board and you have nothing, so you just fold. Then the next time you play a hand with them and you get a similar board texture, and now they check. Because you know they have a donking range and they put their strong hands in it, their checking range becomes unprotected. Every time they check, you can just c-bet (continuation bet) everything and expect to get a lot of folds because their range will be significantly weaker.
SS: Weitzman had 14 big blinds behind, and there was another player with about 18 big blinds. Is this a good spot for Winston to apply ICM (Independent Chip Model) pressure or does he usually have a hand here?
PL: I think he has to have some equity. He can’t just do it with air because I think the big blind is showing a significant amount of strength by donking so big on this board without much behind. He shouldn’t expect him to lead this big and fold. More likely than not, he’s got a strong top pair.
The Action: The action folded to Haralbos Voulgaris, who completed the small blind. Weitzman checked his option from the big blind. Both players checked the flop and Voulgaris bet 155,000 on the turn. Weitzman called. Both players checked the river and Weitzman won the pot at showdown.
SS: Action folds to Haralabos in the small blind, who completes. Open limping is still somewhat prevalent in today’s game, but what were the types of hands you would generally see people limp with?
PL: Open limping is definitely part of a pretty viable preflop strategy, even in 2020. And you’re going to see it a lot more once you get to a sub-20 big blind stack depth. You can have some open limps from the cutoff with like 15 big blinds or so. And the same thing for the button.
But specifically, in this spot, blind vs. blind, the optimal strategy does include a lot of limps from the small blind. Especially with an ante in the pot, the small blind is getting such a good immediate price to complete, they really are going to be incentivized to play a lot of their hands. And because their ranges are going to be so wide, often times, the small blind will often play a limp-only strategy and then respond accordingly if the big blind does choose to raise.
SS: Weitzman checks his option and the flop is A-K-J with two hearts. Both players check and the 9 comes on the turn. Voulgaris decides to take a pot-sized stab with his deuces. I remember a limp-stab strategy being implemented in these spots. Is this just a delayed limp-stab?
PL: With deuces, nowadays, the standard play preflop would be just to shove when the big blind has 20 big blinds and you cover him. The low pocket pairs don’t play particularly well post-flop, especially against the big blind.
As played, most players would take a stab right away with deuces on the flop. On an A-K-J board texture, when the big blind checks back, he is going to be really capped and not have any of the strong hands in his range. Those are the hands he would’ve raised or shoved preflop.
It’s unlikely that the big blind has an ace in his hand, whereas the small blind can still have some of the stronger hands in his range that was going for a limp-raise. It’s a better board texture for the small blind, so I think the better play would be to stab the flop. Even just for one big blind would be fine. If the big blind has two unders, they aren’t going to continue regardless of what size he chooses.
When we get to the turn, he’s probably thinking the same thing. The big blind probably doesn’t have that much, and he’s just going to bet his hand and deny some equity. I think the pot-sizing is not super effective. What he’s trying to…