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Welcome to Grand Tour

May 11, 2020
by Pete Clarke

Grand Tour is here! Hop on to your bike and exercise your Sit and Go skills. If you want to knock out players (cyclists) out of the tournament (race); collect their bounties (jerseys) and win many times your buy-in (prize money) then Grand Tour is the format for you!

Where to Join the Race?

Grand Tour is a multiple stage sit and go experience. There are six stages to the race – $1.00, $2.00, $5.00, $12.00, $25.00, and $60.00. You can join the race at any stage by paying the relevant buy-in cost or work your way up from the beginning by winning each heat. A heat contains four players.

There are two incentives for working your way up stage by stage. Firstly, you get to earn bounties from the players you eliminate along the way; and secondly, the more bounties you earn, the bigger the stack you start the next stage with. This second benefit has the huge advantage of placing you in a position where you cover opponents who have bought in at that stage of the race. This gives you the first shot at busting people and earning their bounties.

The advantage to buying in a bit higher up the chain of stages is that you will reach the final stage more often where the big money is waiting. You only really make a lot from Grand Tour when you win the final stage. If your own bounty is above $100, and usually if you’ve made it this far, it will be, then you earn your own bounty by winning the race plus extra money for any scalps (I mean jerseys!) you’ve picked along the way.

Heat Structure

There are four players in a heat and starting stacks are around 20 big blinds, depending on how many bounties you have accumulated. The pace is hyper-turbo – a fast and furious format. There are no antes, but blinds increase rapidly. It is imperative to work on your push or fold game to give yourself the best chance of winning your heat. We shall talk more about the strategy of Grand Tour in future articles in this series.

Only the winner of a heat advances. The other three players are eliminated. This means that you will usually lose your heats. The goal is to progress much more often than the field; not to usually progress as this would be impossible even for a player with a large edge. If you win your four-player heat 30% of the time, then you’re outplaying the field.

Bountiful Multipliers (Earning Jerseys)

When you knock someone out, you take their jersey and earn a random prize.

Most often, you earn 25% of a player’s bounty when you bust someone whose bounty is below $10.80 and 20% of a bounty above $10.80. This instant reward gets credited to your account straight away. It is yours regardless of how well you do in the race. This amount is called the prize percentage of your opponents’ bounties. The true amount you receive each time you earn a prize is determined by an algorithm which includes some enormous bounties a small amount of the time. Spin and Go players will be familiar with this kind of system.

As well as earning a part of the player’s bounty immediately after busting them, you also get to add a large part of their total amount to your own bounty. Remember that increasing your own bounty is important as your main goal is to get it above $100 so that you can win upon winning the race. When you eliminate an opponent, you will add 50% of their bounty to your own bounty for values below $10.80 and 60% on bounties above $10.80. This is called the progressive percentage.

Profitability

Grand Tour’s format is extremely lively and exciting. There is always a chance of making a huge amount of money and the constant supply of smaller values in the form of jerseys reduces the variance of each run you make. If you buy in for $12, and come second in your heat, you will often have busted a player or two and earned a chunk of your buy-in back.

The excitement of Grand Tour attracts a wide array of player types; many of them recreational. This makes obtaining an edge quite easy for a serious player who has prepared for the format. It is my initial impression that Grand Tour is very lucrative and worth a shot. The format might be especially promising for Spin and Go specialist as the variance is a lot lower than they are used to and the field just as soft.

Welcome to Grand Tour

We shall be exploring how to improve our play in Grand Tour throughout this series of articles. We shall focus heavily on turbo sit and go strategy, but also exploring how the bounty system affects the optimal strategy in different spots.

Summary

  • Grand Tour is a multiple stage Sit and Go tournament, consisting of six rounds of four-player heats where the winner advances to the next stage.
  • Players add to their own bounty and claim instant cash prizes by eliminating opponents. The latter are randomised and some huge cash rewards are sometimes handed out.
  • Having people covered is strategically huge and this incentivises joining the race earlier than the final stage as players with higher bounties start each heat with more chips.
  • Grand Tour is full of all kinds of player types and it is possible to gain quite a large edge due to the intricacies of bounty play, despite the quick pace of the format.

What are you waiting for? On your bike!

 

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