Spin and Gos

pretty sure the house is making more rake from these than standard sng's. they take a loss when the prize pool is multiplied but the times that you play for 2 buyins which is by far the most likely outcome more than makes up for this.

here you go with the most recent changes.

Originally posted by billnmex
just wondering how the house is making money off these. how, when 3 players enter for $10 each and the payout is $60 does this work? there has to be a catch.

Don't you worry about PS, they know how to calculate a profit out of these

Here is the breakdown using the above table for $1 GI games :

        Multiplier    Quantity            
              3600           1      3600  
               240           5      1200  
               120          10      1200  
                25         100      2500  
                10         500      5000  
                 6        7500     45000  
                 4       18366     73464  
                 2       73518    147036  
               Sum      100000    279000  
           7% Rake                 21000  
  Total Prize Pool                300000  

The catch is that you need to win a decent percentage of your 2x games, because you'll be playing more of them than of anything else.

Cheers,
VS

Most of the time you only play for x2 your wager. So if you play the $1 one, 3 players register so that should be a $3 prize pool but its only $2. So PS have taken rake AND that extra $1.
That's how they make money on these.

Originally posted by Bullettooth12
Most of the time you only play for x2 your wager. So if you play the $1 one, 3 players register so that should be a $3 prize pool but its only $2. So PS have taken rake AND that extra $1.
That's how they make money on these.

Hi, Bullettooth12
If you check two or three posts back, you'll see a table where it shows quite clearly that the "extra $1" is given back in the higher-multiple games.

The "extra $1" is not rake in the usual sense of the word -- it is part of a larger prize pool from the which the higher-multiple games are paid.

The "difference" between the amount paid in, and the amount paid across all multiples is 7%

The 7% goes to PokerStars bottom line. The "extra $1" would be considered a fund from which to pay Spingo prizes.

Cheers,
VS

1-----------0.00001------3000------0.03
5-----------0.00005------200-------0.01
10---------0.0001--------100-------0.01
100--------0.001---------25---------0.025
500--------0.005---------10---------0.05
7500------0.075----------6----------0.45
18366-----0.18366------4----------0.73464
73518-----0.73518------2----------1.47036

=$2.78 payed out on average, compared to $3 taken from all players

2.78/3 = 92.66% => ~ 6% rake.

The second column is the probability of the payout.

The third column is the payout.

The final column shows the effective value of all results, which sums up to = $2.78

Just noticed that Vorpal has already done this, based on 100,000 instances instead of probability, so I can see I've got a rounding error.

Hi, lynius,
I took the numbers from PokerStars own Spingo page

And yes, it is probably a rounding thing.

Also, I'm pretty sure that the occurrence of 3600x prizes is random, so sometimes PokerStars will be ahead, sometimes behind, but with their volume it will even out in short order.

Cheers,
VS

The extra money is offer...

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
I'm pretty sure that the occurrence of 3600x prizes is random, so sometimes PokerStars will be ahead, sometimes behind, but with their volume it will even out in short order.
VS

This is true - if they randomly generate the prize pools (my opinion leans that this is the appropriate assumption)

However, it would be interesting to consider that they may produce "batches" of spin and gos for respective levels - similar to how scratch cards can be made and distributed. In this regard, variance is a mitigated issue if their net gain is pre determined after a set interval.

Originally posted by lynius
However, it would be interesting to consider that they may produce "batches" of spin and gos for respective levels - similar to how scratch cards can be made and distributed. In this regard, variance is a mitigated issue if their net gain is pre determined after a set interval.

So if they do batches of 100K spins, then their exposure is limited.

Good thinking...,
VS

IPoker (Ladbrokes in particular) write explicitly that they do produce Twister prizes in batches of 20K games. I don't know if it's the case for Stars, that would be interesting to learn.

ya they make so much money they should rename them sit & pissurmoneyuponawll

If they really are made in small batches then it wouldn't be hard to write software that keeps track of the prizepool for every game that fires and can calculate when the prizepool is actually more than 3$ on average....

It can't be written this way because others' games aren't shown in the lobby (and the batch is global).

But as 3600x Spingos are listed in the lobby, it would be possible to assess the conditional probability of hitting a 3600x in your game by comparing the times of past hits (if they're too close to each other in time, they can't be in the same batch). So I don't believe Stars release them in batches, they must be drawing the prize for each game independently.

On iPoker, winners of 1000x Twisters aren't listed in the lobby (€5K-10K winners might be listed by an individual room with a delay, but some don't do it at all), hence you can't determine how far you are from the end of the current batch and whether a 1000x has already appeared in it; so your best guess is that it will hit in your game 1 time out of 20000 (unless you've hit two back-to-back 1000x's yourself and are now considering going for the 3rd, which is -EV to do just after shipping the 2nd one).

Interresting tho i stopped playing those

The chance of getting a bigger prize is small, perhaps they are making money out of those chances that we don't get the bigger prizes. 😊

Hello guys,

Do you think "Spin and Gos" and "Twister" is a profitable game?

Thanks.

Hi jhtan

Its hard to say if they are a profitable game but mathematically they can be. Variance is huge and strict BRM and volume essential. There is a very interesting thread here by RW666, his opening bankroll was $50 in October he now has $800

https://forums.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=328103

The rake varies depending on the buy in, calculations over 300000 it works out like this for spin n go:

$1 7%
$3 $7 6%
$15 $30 5%

Therefore to breakeven you need winrates respectively of 35.9% 35.5% and 35.1%

Twister is similar EG:

For twister prize-pool structure of a $10 buy-in you contest (when all is considered) an average pay-out of $28 about 6.6% house rake.