Hybrid of multiple formats
PokerStars has introduced a new game called Grand Tour. Though the online poker room has been known for its novelty cash games the last couple years, this one is not a ring game, but rather a progressive knockout Sit & Go competition.
Incorporating aspects of Spin & Go’s and shootout tournaments as well, Grand Tour affords players the chance to win thousands of dollars by only risking a buck. The game also takes advantage of the PokerStars Aurora graphics engine, presenting the lobby as a colorful, animated landscape and utilizing custom animations at the tables.
Grand Tour affords players the chance to win thousands of dollars by only risking a buck
“PokerStars Grand Tour is fast, competitive, and progressive and we are excited to bring it to our players on .COM, .EU, and .UK,” said Severin Rasset, managing director and commercial officer of poker at The Stars Group in the April 30 official announcement. “We wanted to combine aspects of both and find a brand new way to entertain and reward our players.”
PokerStars did not specify if Grand Tour is a temporary or permanent addition to the lobby. Grand Tour is currently only available for play money on the .COM and .NET clients, but will launch for real money on .COM, .EU, and .UK “in due course.”
Collect bounties, climb the ladder
Grand Tour, utilizing a bicycle race theme that echoes the Tour de France (the lobby art depicts Paris in the background), is effectively a “steps” Sit & Go competition. There are six buy-in tiers: $1, $2, $5, $12, $25, and $60. Players can pay to enter at any tier.
The games themselves are four-handed, hyper-turbo Sit & Go’s. They are of the progressive knockout variety; the way players win money is to eliminate opponents. There is no prize awarded to the winner of a Sit & Go, aside from bounties that the player has won.
If a player wins the Sit & Go, called a “sprint,” that player advances to another round to play against opponents with similar-sized bounties. The first attempt at that next tier is free. The eventual goal is to win a sprint with a bounty value of $100 or more. If a player accomplishes this, they win their own bounty and can start again.
Multiplier can boost cash prize
The divide between the progressive and prize portions of the bounty is determined by the average bounty value at the table. If the average bounty is between $0.90 and $10.80, the progressive percentage is 50% and the prize percentage is 25%. If it the average bounty value is $10.81 or higher, those percentages change to 60% and 20%, respectively.
Using PokerStars’ example to illustrate, if the average bounty value at the table is $10 and a player eliminates an opponent, that player’s own bounty will go up by $5 (50%) and they will receive $2.50 in cash (25%).
multiplier is randomly drawn based on a preset probability table
The Spin & Go element comes into play with the cash prize piece of the bounty. The percentage determines a cash prize baseline; that baseline is then increased by a multiplier. This multiplier is randomly drawn based on a preset probability table, similar to Spin & Go prize pools.
Multipliers can be 1x to 5x (increments of 0.5x), 6x to 10x, 100x, or 300x when the average bounty is $10.80 or less. At $10.81 and above, the top two multipliers change to 25x and 6,000x. The majority of the time, the multiplier will be 1x, 1.5x, or 2x.