888poker remove SNGs from their offering
After more than 20 years, Sit & Go tournaments are no longer available at one of the first poker rooms to offer them.
Once a staple part of online poker, the traditional Single Table Tournament is on its knees these days. Earlier this month 888poker removed standard SNGs from their lobby.
888poker was one of the first sites to offer Single Table Tournaments, or Sit'N'Gos (SNGs), online more than 20 years ago when the site was known as Pacific Poker. SNGs at Pacific were literally the first real money online game this writer had ever played.
They were once the best place for new players to learn the game. With just one table they didn't take a long time (unlike in MTTs) and there was a cap on your losses in that session (unlike in cash games). They also taught newbies full ring, deep stack, shorthanded, heads-up, shallow stack, and ICM all at once.
Spin & Go promises more for newbies
In more recent years the Lottery SNG, known as BLAST at 888poker but Spin & Go more colloquially, took over this role in poker. They are much faster, mobile optimised, and offer the promise of a potential fortune via the lottery jackpot element.
SNG tournaments are still on offer at most sites, although relative newcomer to the scene GGPoker never offered them due to their declining popularity (GGPoker does have Battle Royale and a six max Spin & Gold variant, however, which are very similar). PokerStars are the only site to offer them with a significant amount of traffic, but even their numbers are dwindling.
It seems inevitable that other poker rooms will follow suit and stop offering traditional Single Table Tournaments in the near future, other than perhaps PokerStars which enjoys something of a network effect with them.
Should online sites retire SNGs? Let us know in the comments:
