Winamax Launches Expresso Eleven, Poker Players Throw Objects at Monitors
This article is not going to be for everyone. It certainly isn’t for me, a guy who is stuck without online poker in the southern United States. I can’t even play on sites IN the United States, for Pete’s sake. But if you live in the European Union and have a European bank account, keep reading if you would like. You don’t have to – you aren’t about to be blasted into a lifetime of enlightenment or anything – but the French online poker site Winamax is in the midst of a promotion right now that I, personally, find rather interesting. So if you play on there, are thinking about playing on there, or are just procrastinating right now and decided to read anything you can find on the internet, let me tell you about the Expresso Eleven promotion the site has going on right now.
Expresso Poker, as you may or may not know is Winamax’s version of the Lottery Sit & Go. In fact, it is the ORIGINAL Lottery Sit & Go, having debuted in July 2013. PokerStars’ Spin & Go gets all the headlines, but it was Winamax that created this monster. Expresso games are three-handed, hyper-turbo contests in which the prize pool is randomly generated and presented once everyone at the table is seated.
Winamax keeps things simpler than other sites, sticking with the same prize pool multiplier probabilities, no matter what the buy-in. About 76 percent of the time, the prize pool will only be double the buy-in. Another 16 percent of the time, it will be four times the buy-in, and 7 percent of the time, it will be six times the buy-in. The other 1 percent (less, actually), possible prize pool multipliers are 10x, 20x, 50x, 200x, 1,000x, or 10,000x the buy-in.
At prize pool levels of 20x and below, the winner of the Sit & Go takes the entire prize pool. Above that, all three players walk away with something.
Buy-ins are €1, €2, €5, €10, €25, €50, and €100. Thus, it is possible (though not remotely probable), that the prize pool for a €100 Expresso Poker game could be €1,000,000.
Now on to Expresso Eleven.
The Expresso Eleven promo, currently underway, gives players a chance to win more money in Expresso Poker games when they keep spinning the measly 2x prize pool multiplier. Whenever a player participates in an Expresso Poker contest with the minimum prize pool multiplier, a card depicting one of the eleven Team Winamax members will appear. Should the player win the game, the card will be added to his collection. Collect enough unique cards, win prizes.
Here is the list of Team Winamax members:
Michel “Mik.22” Abecassis
Gaëlle “O RLY” Baumann
Patrick “P14B” Bruel
Pierre “LeVietF0u” Calamusa
Florian “1flip 2win” Decamps
Guillaume “volatile38” Diaz
Davidi “Kitbul” Kitai
Sylvain “Loosli” Loosli
Bruno “Kool Shen” Lopes
Alexandre “Alexonmoon” Luneau
Aurélie “RunGood4Love” Quélain
Sounds simple enough, right? Yeah, just wait. Keep all sharp objects locked down in another room.
There is one rule that will force aneurysms in Winamax players everywhere: if a player is presented with the chance to win a card that he already has in his collection, he must win the Sit & Go or else he loses that card. Let’s be clear: the player doesn’t lose out on winning the card again, he loses the card from his collection.
Imagine the agony. A player has ten out of eleven cards, only needing the elusive Davidi Kitai to round out the collection and win the grand prize. He sits down for an Expresso Poker game, gets the 2x multiplier, and…it’s just another Sylvain Loosli.
The match is close. The player gets heads-up and has his opponent covered. They both go all-in; our hero has Aces, his opponent with Kings. A King flops, the opponent doubles-up, and our hero bombs out of the tournament a few hands later. The Loosli card is jettisoned from the player’s collection, so now he needs to not only get luck for both the Loosli and Kitai cards to appear in a 2x Expresso game, but he still has to win them. AND he can’t keep losing other matches, lest he be stripped of more cards.
It’s masochistic.
Each buy-in level has its own card collection, so if a player loses, say, a €5 game, he won’t have the card taken from his €2 collection.
Prizes start at seven cards acquired. The prize at each card amount can only be won once, so if a player collects seven cards, then loses one, then wins one to get back to seven, he won’t win the same prize twice. The list of prizes is as follows:
7 Cards: 1 Expresso ticket for that collection’s buy-in amount
8 Cards: 2 Expresso tickets
9 Cards: 5 Expresso tickets
10 Cards: 50x the buy-in in cash
11 Cards: 1,000x the buy-in in cash
So go ahead, torture yourself. The promotion will end when €500,000 has been doled out. The total is currently around €89,000.
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