PokerStars has become the first online poker room to offer short deck lottery tournaments, launching 6+ Hold’em Spin & Go events on Thursday.
The new tournaments are available on both the .com and .eu versions of the PokerStars software, with buy-ins ranging from just $1 to $100.
Short Deck Here for the Long Term
As in other Spin & Go formats, the 6+ tournaments are three-player winner-take-all freezeouts, and players don’t know the prize pool until after the game begins, with payouts ranging from 2x to 12,000x the buy-in.
These new Spin & Go tournaments are clearly a product of how poker looks in 2019. Not only do they use the short deck format, but they also employ a button blind structure in which all players put up an ante, but the player on the button also posts a live blind.
The addition of a short deck Spin & Go format was predictable, as the format has been taking off in popularity over the past two years. Originally confined to high stakes cash games, it began to trickle into games enjoyed by wider audiences in 2018. Once it made its appearance at the Triton Super High Roller Series, short deck hold‘em because the game of the hour, quickly spreading throughout the poker world.
PokerStars finally brought its version of short deck to the internet in January, calling it 6+ Hold’em. The game finally gave the site a successful new variant to add to its lineup, after games like Unfold Poker and Showtime Hold’em failed to gain much of an audience. After an initial run as a cash game, sit and go and multitable tournaments were also added in the format, with 6+ events being held during SCOOP and other PokerStars tournament festivals.
Fewer Cards Means More Action
6+ (or short deck) Hold’em is a relatively simple variation on standard Texas Hold’em, with the main change being that all cards ranked five or lower have been removed from the deck. That leaves the deck with just 36 cards, improving the odds of players making big hands. That made it a hit in high roller circles, as the format increased action and built bigger pots than traditional hold’em.
The shortened deck does require a few other rule changes as well. Aces still count high and low, meaning they can take part in a straight of A-6-7-8-9. The odds of making various hands are also altered, which has led to different hand rankings being used in various short deck games. In the PokerStars 6+ Hold’em variant, the only change is that a flush now outranks a full house, with all other rankings remaining the same.
PokerStars isn’t the only online poker operator to get in on the short deck action. The game has quickly become ubiquitous on the internet, with Partypoker and 888 Poker being among the many sites that have added their own versions of the variant.
