Anything that slows a rec player’s roll on its way to the better players is, say it with me, good for the game. Just as important is its natural appeal to recreational players. With one small, easily explained rule tweak you change the way the game is played. The appeal of these new versions lies in two main factors. And most recently, short deck is hold’em again, but this time with fewer cards. And spin’n’goes are sit’n’goes, but with more variance. Zoom tables are just multi-tabling, but less exhausting. Similar constraints seem to drive poker trends as players grow bored of last year’s innovation, but don’t want to lose their minds and learn something weird like Badugi.Īs a result, we have seen games rise and fall in popularity largely by making small tweaks to popular games. As a result, names cycle in popularity ( apart from Michael, a perennial favorite). Every few years millions of parents try to avoid being either too basic or too extra. Poker trends online are guided by similar principles to the popularity of baby names. Especially one that is so clearly good for the game. When a trend takes off like this it is worth analysing. Every single one of them was a PKO.Ī few months ago PKO events were so popular that Stars and GGPoker didn’t see any risk to their profits in running their PKO series in parallel. For three-and-a-half weeks (from Dec 25th to Jan 19th) they have put on well over 100 events. Party’s KO Series is winding to a close in a few days. The variant is now the default.īoth partypoker and PokerStars have switched so comprehensively to the PKO format that they have started to simply call them KO Tournaments.

In fact, calling it a variant no longer feels accurate. Try and find a knock out tournament in 2021 that doesn’t use the progressive variant.

Progressive knockout