Pokerstars Tetris Spin and Go's Explained!

So last week Pokerstars released their promotion Tetris Spin and Go's combining the much loved block falling puzzle game with their lottery Sit n' Go's.

Despite their attempts at explaining how it works, I feel that their attempt was quite insuffiencent and so I'm going to explain it better here.

To start the challenge go to the Spin and Go lobby, pick the stake you want to play and click join. For each different buy in of Spin there are different leaderboards so you will have to join them seperately to enter each one. Once you've clicked join then you will be entered in the challenege each day without needing to join again.

As far as I know, the first games you play each day will count towards the challenge.

Start up a Spin and Go to start!

When the Spin and Go loads up you will see a banner which tells you how many line clears you will get for winning it.

So winning this Spin will earn you 4 line clears. 

Line clears are the lines in Tetris that disappear so the more you have the higher your level will go, and the higher your score will be. Your level goes up every 5 lines clears. You accumulate more points for being at higher levels.

Example of what the Tetris board looks like

You can view the Tetris board as a new tab on the bottom left of the game, where the chat and game info are. Here you can see your level, lines and current score. 

As far as I know, the board is just a graphical representation of your board, it doesn't actually drop Tetrimanoes like the game.

The lobby will also show the same board, but I've found that it doesn't update as quickly. Usually the most newly opened Spin should show the most current board.

I prefer the minimal theme but otherwise the table looks pretty cool with Tetriminoes moving around in the background;

This theme can be disabled via the "Table" dropdown on the top left corner where you can click the "Disable Optional Graphics" setting 

Depending on the multiplier and finish position you will get a certain number of line clears.

The score is calculated after each spin and it goes as follows;

The board will show its status of how filled up it is. There are 3 statuses, green, amber and red. Above it shows the green state. The more your board fills up, the higher the status it goes. Once it goes past red it is Game Over and the challenge ends.

Example of Amber board status

Red board status, nearly Game Over!

What the board shows once the challenge is over

Depending on the finish and multiplier, the board state will change accordingly;

Table showing how the status changes depending on your level

As you can see, the higher the level the harder it becomes to improve the board status meaning that you will Game Over much more quicker, meaning fewer bad placements can end the challenge.

The leaderboard tab will show your current standings in the challenge.

From my experience for the $10 stake, 100k+ points should land you in the top 50 for $50.

I managed to a top 10 finish already which was great, I absolutely ran like god winning every flip and then demolished my opponents heads up with double stacks. 

Getting this score took about 30 Spins. A colleague created a simulation and it showed that it

16 hours later, I came top 30th if I recall correctly for $50 which was nice.

The interesting dynamic that this promotion brings is that it gives more meaning to the 2x multipliers, which tend to be softer then the higher ones due to the fact that you can win more. So in theory, this should make the games harder as players will be tryharding more then usual in those games.

However this should bring more recreational players to the games, but from my one week's experience this hasn't seemed to be the case for me, it seems the same. This might be due to the lack of proper marketing for this promotion.

This strange video was the only main thing I found to promote this, and it doesn't really seem that related to Tetris at all apart from the number 4.

This promotion will last until the end of March, so check it out!

Paying back the EV

 It was bound to happen, I've been paying back the run good that I had in Jan...

Last week I was 74 buy ins below what I was expected to lose

It can be soul crushing to happen but it is an inevitability. According to this post, using a Spin and Go simulator running 10k games and a player with a 36% winrate (my Jan was 39%),  40% of players had a low point of losing 63 buy ins, 20% was down 111 buy ins!

The tough thing is to keep playing, keep hitting the tables every day and when things are going bad its hard to find the movitation. All you can do is keep studying and keep playing. You can take a break, which is what I used to do, but if you don't play you don't get paid!

Another persepective is that variance keeps you grounded, and I've been studying more and looking for ways to improve my game. I think I'm out of it now (touch wood) and gonna try and get back on track.

This morning I saw some tables with "Line clears" on them which was strange but apparently there's a new somewhat random promition combining Tetris with Spin and Go's.

Why is there a random guy there? Couldn't they have designed this better?

New Spin lobby look!

You get this "board" whilst doing the Tetris leaderboard challenge

Anyways, this thing seems brand new and is a bit buggy (leaderboards got taken down for a while). The instructions are confusing as hell you can try and translate it;

https://www.pokerstars.uk/poker/promotions/tetris-spin-go

Will keep an eye on this promotion and probs blog about it next week. Seems strange how Pokerstars didn't really promote this much at all, what's going on with their marketing??

King of Spin and Go 10 Challenge!

Pokerstars has a daily challenge for Spin and Go's where you can win money if you make the leaderboard you can win money.

The way it works is you play 10 Spins and for each multiplier type you get that many points and you will get another amount of that multiplier if you win that particular Spin. You can choose when to start the challenge but after that the next 10 Spins is what counts.

For example;

You start the challenge and get 10x multiplier and win it. 10x multi = 10pts, winning it = 10pts, total is 20pts.

The points are capped at 20pts per game though.

The best strategy is to start the challenge just as your about to win a 10x. It only starts counting once the game closes, so if you can remember to start it then you guarentee 30pts immediately.

55pts should guarentee a prize which is top 50 at the $5/10 level.

Looks like 48pts should get top 50 at the $25 level.

Last week I managed to get top prize after winning two 10x's which came up in my challenge. When I saw the first 10x I started the challenge, then another one popped up!

Was given quite the gift in the 2nd one as what I thought was a good reg decided to rejam his 43 into my TT for some weird reason.

The next few games were a good number of 5x's and 3x's and I shipped some of them too to finish with 75pts!

It's a weird system honestly, but I guess Pokerstars wants the recreational players to have a chance at it too, if they manage to win a multiplier then they could be on the leaderboard as well.

I had previously made the leaderboard twice, so it has been quite a bit of bonus money to add to my bankroll. 

Things are going well with the overall grind, my plan is to get abour 150 buy ins before moving up to the $25 stakes, it will be quite an adjustment to get used to the bigger swings moving from $10s to 2.5x that amount so I want to have a decent buffer.