Jackpot SNGs Introduced and Cash Game Offering Narrowed at Full Tilt Poker

Full Tilt Poker card room director Shyam Markus announced yesterday that FTP introduced a range of changes, effective 24 June 2014.

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Following the payment scandal after the Black Friday, Full Tilt Poker re-launched in November 2012 as a skin of market leader PokerStars owner Rational Group. While many had expected FTP to quickly retake its former number #2 position on the market under Rational, this has not or only partly been realised.

FTP is widely regarded to have one of the best clients around and Rational has a reputation of a trustworthy company with no more payment issues to be feared. Still, the room is occupying only the 5th position on the traffic list and has not been able to progress for quite a while now. In fact, player numbers are slowly diminishing.

In order to turn these tendencies back into positive, FTP has been introducing a number of features, including casino games that they help to lure in more recreational players. As of 24 June, additional important changes have been implemented to the client, as described by card room director Shyam Markus in a forum entry:

“Hi all,

“We have an update coming tomorrow (with downtime scheduled to start at 2:30am ET and last approximately an hour) with the following changes:

“A. Jackpot SNGs: A new kind of SNG for Full Tilt where the total prize pool is randomly decided at the start of a 3-handed SNG, based on a multiplier of a single buy-in. So in the case of a $1 Jackpot SNG, the prize pool can be in a range from $2 (2x multiplier) to $2,000 (2,000x multiplier). The prize distribution is winner takes all with the exception of the top 3 multipliers (100x, 500x, and 2,000x), where all 3 players will get paid.

“B. Ring Games: We've updated our offering by removing some games that were being very rarely played these days. We do apologize if we've removed your favorite that you sometimes got to play, and certainly if there's enough of a demand, we will be willing to test out the return of some of these games in the future. This change is intended to remove some clutter in the lobbies (both in the navigation and in the list of tables) to make it easier for players to find games that have more activity.

“In addition, we'll be merging the $2/$4 and $3/$6 stake levels for NL/PL games into a single $2.50/$5 level. And for FL games, the stakes will go: $2/$4, $4/$8, $8/$16, $15/$30, $30/$60+. So there will no longer be $3/$6, $5/$10, $10/$20, or $20/$40 levels for FL games. We hope these changes will add some more action to the remaining stake levels.

“C. Reserved Seat Tables: To go along with the lobby cleanup above, we've made a change to the way tables that have reserved seats (mostly tables bought from the old Iron Man store) display in the game. You will now only see these tables if the owner of the table sits at the table first (if you are an owner you will always see your own table).

“D. Time Bank Activation: Due to popular demand, we've changed the Time Bank (in both ring games and tournaments) to auto-activate when your regular time runs out if you have voluntarily put money into the pot. This means it won't auto-activate if you've only posted blinds or antes.”

The update has already been implemented and the new Jackpot SNG games are already available.