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!
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;
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??
I decided to move back home last month and work on my pokerings again after a long hiatus. The past 3-4 years I have been life skilling it up learning coding and working in that industry. Whilst there, I started playing again pretty casually about 6 months ago.
This month I had been working on adjusting a few things in my game and doing more studying. Last year's results have been poor and things really turned around this month. Surely its gonna be hard for 2021 to be worse than 2020 right?
60 Chip EV in Numbers
One of the frustrating things from researching Spin and Go's was to actually get some real numbers in relation to Chip EV. I am aware of SwongSim which is a Spin and Go simulator which gives you a good idea of the types of variance one might get. For more information I found this post helpful, as well as this video by Coffeeyay. So here's some real numbers...
I spent the first 9 days playing $5 spins building the roll, before taking a shot at the $10s. This was my 2nd shot and it went much, much better then the first time. One thing to keep in mind moving up was that the biggest daily downswing I had at $5s was 16 buy ins, so it was important to mentally prepare for that.
I managed to play just shy of 3k games in total this month.
815 x $5 Spins (7% rake) @46 chip ev
2163 x $10 Spins (8% rake) @66 chip ev
Hours played: 114
Total: $1650
1sts: 38.9% (HEM3 Says 39.3% not sure why)
2nds: 31%
3rds: 29.8%
Winning days: 23 of 30
Losing days: 6
Breakeven days: 1
Winning day streak: 11
Biggest winning day: 45 buy ins
Biggest downswing day: 14 buy ins
Highest ITM day: 50.4% over 113 games
Lowest ITM day: 23% over 65 games
Biggest Chip EV day: 170 chip ev over 96 games (16k)
Spin Challenge leaderboard cashes: Top 5 twice $37.50 each
Multipliers above 5x's:
3 x 25x
8 x 10x
Rakeback (Diamond chest): $700
$325 in starcoins
15 x Free $5 Spin Tickets winnings: $125
$250 cash prize wow
Max diamond chest gift on my last session of the month!
Final total: $2425
Soooo yeah I ran pretty good lol. Not that I didn't work hard at it, I've been studying a lot of spots and also been using ICMizer daily to make sure I'm not missing end game heads up shoving.
These changes to my game have for sure changed my non showdown winnings, which is debateable in the Spin community as to whether it makes a difference or not. Either way, I do believe that getting these extra folds leads to a bigger stack, which in turn should give you the lead more often then not.
This month's Chip EV
Terrible 2020 6k game sample
3k games is a small sample, but hopefully things can continue. I'm aware that I ran good, and am pretty scared for when that variance happens. Would really like to reach the $25 stakes.
I hope that this post will help others see what kind of variance and money to expect. Money will be completely dependent on the frequency of high multipliers you get and ship though, so its always best to look at the Spin God stat CHIP EV to get an idea of how well your playing.
Happy grindin' peeps, have a great Feb and for the love of God let this pandemic end soon...