Two vastly different topics caught my curiosity this past week, Blast Poker and the well intended efforts of the Nevada Gaming Control Board to try and come up with regulations related to sexual harassment, both of which caused me to pause and think that things are getting a bit blurry.
Blast Poker
Let’s start with the easy one. Since Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware are now all co-mingling players for online poker, things should start getting interesting again in the world of online poker. The larger player pooling assures more continual action, greater variety of games as well as denomination of games. While as a player I relish the enhanced activity, variety and increased ratio of “fish” (weak players) to “sharks” on the WSOP site and have enjoyed some early benefits, I was surprised to come across a game called Blast Poker.
While Blast Poker is not new to the online gaming world, with the opening of the common player pool between the three states it became legally available to Nevada online poker players. Blast Poker is a very fast poker variant where the players have a short period of time to play traditional sit-and-go style poker, then if there is not a table winner at the end of the play time, each ensuing hand is played with a mandatory “all in” of the player’s chips until there is a table winner.
Once a table winner is determined, the table winner then gets to see how much they win via a random multiplier of their buy-in that can be as high as 10,000-to-one. In effect this has the players playing poker for four or five minutes to then see the table winner have their buy-in treated in some ways like a slot machine bet to see if they will get a multiplier of two up to 10,000 times. For example, say you buy in for $15, win the table and get the big 10,000-to-1 multiplier; you can win $150,000.
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Gaming Today’s The Analyst is an experienced gaming industry executive who offers insight each week on events and issues affecting the industry. The Analyst’s opinions are his own and may not reflect those of Sports Handle.
