MPN Revising Sit-and-Go Offerings

A year ago, the Microgaming Poker Network (MPN) made severalchanges to its Sit-and-Go lineup, not so much to make anything rec-player friendly, as has been the trend in online poker the last few years, but rather to make everything less confusing and messy. For instance, Sit-and-Go formats were standardized, reducing clutter; the structures of regular, turbo, and super-turbo games were strictly defined. Sit-and-Go fees were straightened out, going down on average. The one big exception there was for Double-Up Sit-and-Go’s, which saw their fees increased as a way to start weaning people off of them (this was rec-friendly move, as MPN felt casual players were out of their depth in Double-Ups). Now, the network is implementing another wave of changes to Sit-and-Go’s – Sit-and-Go 2.0 – in an effort to further streamline its offerings.

Some changes are upcoming, but MPN has already removed “unpopular” Sit-and-Go’s from the lobby. Amongst the casualties were multi-table Sit-and-Go’s and some high stakes non-Hold’em varieties.

With those gone, MPN added new format at the €0.11 buy-in level called “10-Minute Heads-Up,” and that’s exactly what it is. Blinds are a flat 25/50, players start with 30 big blinds, and the game goes on for 10 minutes, max. If nobody has won after 10 minutes, both players are put all-in until it’s over. It sounds kind of dumb, but Poker Room Manager Jonathon Kelly explained in a blog post that there was a desire by players to have a heads-up format that had a predictable, relatively short end time, but still had enough room to play some decent poker.

Looking ahead, MPN will soon be standardizing Sit-and-Go buy-ins. What has been going on in the lobby is that Sit-and-Go’s with similar price points but different structures had slightly different buy-ins and fees. As Kelly said, “….if you want to play a SNG that has a buy in of around €10, you can choose a €10.40, €10.60, €10.80, or €11 depending on the speed and the number of players involved.”

That is messy and be difficult to sort through in the lobby. Thus, MPN is going to group similar Sit-and-Go’s at one price point, only with differences in how the buy-in and fee are divided. All of the ones mentioned above will be set at €11, but some might be €10.40 + €0.60 while other might be €10.60 + €0.40, etc.

Instead of almost 70 different price points, there will be just 16, making for a much cleaner, easier to navigate lobby.

Finally, and this is interesting, all full-ring Sit-and-Go’s will be removed on February 14^th. Only Six-Max and Heads-Up will remain. Similar to the decision to remove poorly performing Sit-and-Go’s already, MPB says that full-ring Sit-and-Go’s just aren’t popular enough to keep around.