Sorry for slow updates guys, right now I'm going through what is most likely the worst downswing at the worst timing. I don't really feel like whining about it here though, especially since I've already done it on my personal blog and am too lazy to cross-post it ITT. If you are interested by any chance, please come to my blog (triplemerge.com).

Anyway, cliff is I decided to exclusively move on to PLO, and out of nowhere I started running ~100 bi below ev in < 1.5k games, while trying to build the roll for PLO. It's not about the amount of money I lost.. I dumped a lot more than this on a single day, but I just wish it didn't happen to me right now. It really hurt, but oh well, we can't really control variance, right? So I'll just do what I can do and see how it goes.

This downswing sucks big time and drained the **** out of me, but it also reminded me of how lucky I am to have great friends in and outside of poker. Something that I might have been taken for granted, but I shouldn't have.

One reg said he can lend me some money with no interest, and another reg offered me a staking deal when I didn't even ask for it. It was very nice of them, and although I said no thanks to both of them, I am still very grateful for that. I am sure it wasn't a very easy thing to do, and I hope I can do the same when my friends are in hardship.

Alex gave me lots of practical advice, and some of them were gold. He also seems to be running pretty terrible atm, and I wish him the very best of luck. Dealing with someone venting about running bad when you are running bad yourself should never be fun, and I can't thank him enough for doing this for me. I still have tons to learn from you, Alex. The same goes to my Korean poker friends.

Although she doesn't understand or play poker at all, my girlfriend cheered me up a lot. She also said "It's okay to lose sometimes, that's poker right?" which is right on spot. Well, tbh my initial reaction to that was like "Eh maybe, but this kinda sucks, blah blah" because I was so frustrated lately, but I kinda feel bad now that I realise all I did was whining when she was just trying to cheer me up If you're reading this by any chance sweety, I'm really sorry about that, and I love you

And to those who drop by here and post ITT, I'd like to say thank you. Believe it or not, it means a lot to me, not just right now but pretty much always. I wish you all the best at the tables.

As always, thanks for reading this guys, and I'll update about my battle vs variance!

Coming soon, stay tuned.

Always a pleasure to find you updating this thread. I am sure you will get out of this period very soon, so just a matter of time Good luck!

Hi roctill7 (gosh, Hester told me your name a while ago but I can't seem to remember),

Thanks for your words! The swings were kinda sickening but you're right, it's all matter of time and I will overcome this sooner or later. Just need to win em flips I guess

How is poker going on your end?

gl w/ teh grind

Thanks, the same to you as well.

Finally winning some flips, and slowly turning things around.



(graph for the last 5 days)

I moved down to below $30s and grinded there for 4-5 days. Never violated BRM for once, so I'm kinda proud of myself for that. Gosh, when was the last time I played anything below $50s? But tbh I don't have any problems with moving down (or up!) when necessary, and it was lots of fun to grind micros after a long, long while.

Anyway, a bit more of this and I'm moving on to PLO!

Got to remember them names mela, hehe...
Thanks , I'm doing great tbh, loving grinding hypers so far and trying to improve more. Other than trying and failing at WCOOP's everything is awesome

BTW, Nice to see you turning things around! Just a time to do it!

Haha yeah, I tried some WCOOP event too and failed miserably.

Thanks for your words, and I hope you will do the same!

Some updates since 21st Sep:



I decided not to include the EV because well, I'm still running pretty bad but I really don't care.

For those who are curious though, here's what it looks like (over a different time interval than the graph above):

A few quick updates:

- I am going to play a couple MTT's in the WSOP circuit event. I will be playing the ME ($1675), 6max ($580) and PLO rebuy ($365) for sure, and possibly a few more events.

- I almost built the roll required to grind PLO full-time. I don't think I'm interested in HUSNG's anymore, at least for now. I have tons of things to say about this topic, and have been talking to some of my poker friends about it for weeks now. But right now I'm feeling kinda lazy and a bit too burnt to talk about it.

- Most likely buying a new car by the end of this year, although this is subject to change. I'm thinking of an Audi A4/TT now but haven't really made up my mind yet.

I hope you are all doing well at the tables!

- mela

GL

Hey man, long time no see! Thanks for dropping by, and I hope poker is going well for you too.

I have already been playing PLO for about a year now. I play both 6m and HU at $50 and 100. Trying to move up to $200 (1/2) and beyond by the end of this year.

I'm interested in your thoughts on this.

Thanks for your interest. I was actually going to post about it on my blog and here, but am not sure if I want to share it with (unspecified) others, as I fear that it might sorta come off as me raining on the parade of some hyper grinders, or belittling their effort and such, which is very far from my intention.

I will think about it for a while and decide whether I will post it ITT or not. On one hand, I think I can say pretty much anything I want to on my blog or even here; on the other hand, I don't really want to give off a wrong/false impression that can mislead some people.

Yeah, that's understandable.

In any case, if you decide against posting it ITT I'll bug you about it in a few days again; I'm willing to accept PMs.

I am very interested in your thoughts on this, so +1 to you posting them if the opinion of a random matters at all.

Fwiw you seem to have a great poker mind and I'm sure you'll succeed regardless of what game type you turn to, though 2mil is certainly ambitious! Good luck!

Haha yeah, I'll let you know either way.

Hi man, thanks for dropping by and your kind words!

I'll have to think about the post a bit more. When I'm done writing I'll show it to a very close poker friend of mine, and once she says okay I'll just post it here with a bit of re-wording. If we don't think it's cool to post, I'll have to keep it to ourselves and a few interested ones unfortunately

You're right, 2mil is def. an ambitious goal, but I'm still shooting for it, hehe. I wish you the very best of luck to you as well.

So Hester makes the shots

Hey mela very cool thread and refreshing to see such a long term goal in the poker world. Sad to see you're transitioning out of husngs but that's certainly understandable - they become a bit monotonous after a while.

Have you given any thought to playing mixed games? You seem to enjoy playing different forms of poker and the player pool at these games is laughably bad at NL & PLO

So some broad gets to decide whether we see one bright man's thoughts or not?

Where would our society be today if that was always the case!

Haha yeah, I wish we had more female poker players but you're right.

Sorry for my belated reply, and thanks for your kind words. I haven't really tried NL / PLO but mostly focusing on PLO these days. Maybe I should give other games a try too - thanks for your suggestions.

Haha, believe it or not, that's pretty much how modern society works too. I'm by no means bright, but I agree with the "some board" part. It's called the representative democracy, or in plain English, the more the powerful.

Alright, so I decided to post about what I think about the status quo about hypers and what we should do about it. Please allow me a day or two, and I'll upload it here and on my blog, maybe on HUSNG forum too for those who are mostly relevant.

Oh, and I officially quit playing HUSNG's. I might come back from time to time, but I thought PLO is the way to go!

Hi Guys,

Today I'd like to share my thoughts on hyper HUSNG's and, to a lesser extent, poker in general. This is something that has been occupying my mind for a couple of months now, if not more, and to be honest I'm not quite sure if I can deliver it well enough with this posting. Nonetheless, I decided to give it a try, largely for two reasons: a) in case I have a biased or skewed opinion on this, others can prove me wrong and I can learn from them; b) if I happen to be right, I believe this is something we, as poker players, should always keep in mind and revisit every now and then. That said, if there are any points that don't make much sense or are unclear, please don't hesitate to ask me via comments/replies and I'd be more than happy to answer, or be convinced otherwise. This is most likely gonna be a tl; dr post, so please allow me for rambling here and there.

First off, let me tell you what made me really think about this. I have been a half-time midstake HUSNG grinder since 2011, and have been doing okay so far. This year I have made about 46k from HUSNG and 5-10k more from other games:



This is not an impressive result by any means, but I would think I have been on a successful side, given that most of my games (>85%) have been played against regs. So it's not like I can't beat the game anymore and decided to complain about it - actually, it's quite on the contrary. As my games improved and I moved up the blinds with a bigger roll, my hourly has been increasing as well (not always, but oh well), to about $80-100/hr these days. I of course wanted it to increase even further, but then it kind of hit the ceiling and made me wonder why, which eventually resulted in this posting.

Here are a few possible reasons:

a) I suck at this game and there's still a ton of room for improvement
b) Traffic is drying up, especially at $100s+
c) You can't make a huge edge in HUSNG
d) All of the above

I'm pretty sure the answer is d). Hell yeah, I still suck at this game and am making tons of mistakes. Actually we all are. The traffic has also been declining by quite a bit. And oh well, they say 4% ROI in hypers is like crushing the game, and that seems to be about the ceiling. But funny thing is, despite being all true, a)-c) are not really independent from each other. In fact, they always go hand in hand.

Before getting there, let me ask you a question. We are 25BB deep, and you have 77 in BB facing my min raise. What would you do?

Well, you most likely would 3b shove that hand. Let's say I called off with A7s and didn't suck out. You got it in with ~70% equity and held! Congratulations, you got it in good and won money! However, as weird as this might sound, you didn't really win any money in this spot.

Why? Because, if our spots were reversed, we most likely would have done the same thing, and I would have won the money with 77. So you didn't really win any money than you "deserved" or "were supposed to." In poker, the money can be made ONLY when you play a hand differently than others would have. That said, if you look into your HM/PT database, I bet the most profitable hand (with highest EV) under 25BB will be AA, because it's so hard to outdraw AA this shallow. However, like I said, that should apply to everyone else, so you probably didn't win much money with that hand than you could. In other words, you didn't outperform others with this particular hand. This is the concept of reciprocality coined by the legendary Tommy Angelo (I highly recommend you all read this article here: http://tommyangelo.com/articles/reciprocality/).

Alright, so this should more or less tell you where the "edge" comes from in poker. That's what we are talking about all the time, right? Tommy Angelo put it concisely: "The hand that has the highest reciprocal potential must be a hand that gets played lots of different ways. It's going to be somewhere between the hands that are rarely folded, and the hands that are rarely played." To rephrase it, your edge in poker comes from playing hands differently from others. Of course, you can also leak money from playing hands differently from others, so you have to make sure you're on the right side.

And here's where it gets interesting. Nowadays in hypers, with the advent of software (ICMIZER, CREV, PPT to name just a few) and hundreds of coaching vids and push-fold charts and whatnot, most players have come to play most hands quite similarly. And to be fair, there's nothing wrong with that. Hypers, or short-stacked poker, are relatively easy to "solve" and there is only one correct solution in most spot, for example 3b shoving 22-88 when facing a min raise at any stack depth. This is especially true for preflop play, but sometimes postflop spots get played quite similarly too. And I know, it feels great when you post a hand you played on 2+2 and everyone says "pretty standard, well played" because your game must be improving. However, that also means you cannot expect to create a huge edge in any of these spots anymore, because once again, there is little reciprocality involved. And such is the nature of hypers. There aren't enough spots for reciprocality to kick in, and if you play a decent (=not sick good but doesn't make tons of mistakes either) reg, it would be very optimistic to shoot for 4%+ ROI vs him/her.

Of course, you might argue that this is only applicable to reg vs reg situations, and fish always makes tons of mistake (=reciprocality), so there's still money to be made. Yes, that's true. So let's talk about that part now, namely playing fish, or simply, traffic.

So wait, how do you play fish in hypers? Well, I guess pretty much all regs are using sharky these days. For all I know, this is a pretty cool software and have saved lots of regs from the wrist pain and annoying pop-up windows, to say the least. Thanks to this we can just stand in the line and wait for the fish, just like we wait to get seated in a restaurant. Or let's say a seafood buffet place for the analogy's sake (and because I am craving for some sushi), where you have to wait in the line to go another round and get more fish from the salad/sushi bar.

Now, back in the days, there was no such thing as a waiting line. You could just go straight to the salad bar and get all the fish you want. You could even get 4 fish at the same time when the restaurant is empty. Life was breezy and dandy (or fishy?). But this restaurant, called hyper sushi bar, got so popular lately and people just flood into it, so they had to make you wait in the line. Or more like, they put you on a moving walkway so that you don't have to move an inch. At first you only had to wait for 30 sec, so no biggies, you could just eat it quick and then go for another round. Then more people came, so you now have to wait for 2 min. Eh, whatever, it's still fine. Then even more people came, and you have to wait for 5 min. And sometimes, why not 10 min?

Wait a minute (or 5 min), this is not right! I want more fish! So you try a couple of different things. You cut in front of the line and directly goes to the salad bar, instead of sitting on the moving walkway. And guess what, some other fish lover shows up and beats the crap out of you because he wants fish too and you blocked his way! You guys fight right there, and as a result nobody gets to eat fish, unless they go all the way back to the line and wait for another 5 min. Then it occurs to you that maybe you can get 3 or 4 fish at once, like you used to before. But hell no, they put a new sign that says "only 1 fish at a time" and you have to wait again before eating the second fish. Even worse, if you're new to the restaurant, you can wait for 5 min only to get beaten by another regular at this restaurant, who doesn't recognise you and thinks you shouldn't take their fish away from you. They will do it over and over again for quite some time, which is not exactly fun.

I don't want to go too far on this because I'm a terrible story teller, but I hope you got the idea out of it. As the number of sharky users increased, so did the waiting time. At first it didn't matter so much, but as of now I think it's safe to say that we simply cannot play vs. fish as much as before. Like I said, most spots in hyper lack reciprocality, so for the most part it's much better to play fish than regs. Quality over quantity. At some point though, you just realise you can't play that many fish no matter what you try, so you go ahead and sit some seemingly weak regs, or any regs for that matter. Now you can get more volume, but your ROI is gonna drop for sure. Quantity over quality.

At the end of the day, all that matters is your profit, not your ROI. If you can play a ton vs regs and make more money than you could by opensitting and only playing fish, that's fine. However, that's not possible for everyone. And if regs played each other all the time instead of waiting for their turn to play fish, it will be a total chaos and I doubt hypers will be as profitable as it is now. For this reason, most regs just mutually agree that they won't play each other, and hypers can stay the way it is. In that sense, we are all in the same boat. I don't really want to call this boat Titanic, but it doesn't really seem like a Hindenburg either to me, to say the least.

I know some regs are constantly trying to improve their game, mostly to beat other regs. I have been there, done that. And whilst I have been doing rather well in this, I kind of came to a conclusion that it's not very worth it. What I mean by this is, no matter how hard I crush them, my hourly (or daily profit, the same thing) isn't gonna be the same as before. It's most likely gonna decrease, gradually but steadily. On top of that, working on one's game or studying it takes a lot of time, so most regs just give up on that and grind instead, which I don't think is wrong at all. So yeah, we're probably not in a Hindenburg.

Now if I finish my post here, it will come off just as yet another "no money HU everyone's solid" article, and I didn't mean to sound that pessimistic. This is what I have been playing for 3+ years, and if anything, I'd like to think I'm on a solid side although I still have much to learn. I just wanted you to think about this seriously. Many regs I have encountered, some of which were winning ones at $200s+, didn't really seem to be caring much about it, although they all admitted that the traffic was going down. To rephrase it, most of them were aware of the possibility that they might be making less money in the future, but they didn't take any active action against it, or maybe they just didn't know how to.

Although I might have made hypers look pretty bad, I think there are still quite a few ways of working around this problem, both in and out of hypers. And this is what I really, really wanted to say when starting off this article. So let me get to that without further ado.

In hypers, there are still tons of spots where we have no clear idea of what we're doing. Just like any other form of poker, hypers are a game of range construction, and this is something you have to keep in mind ALL the time. When you're OOP, you have to build solid x/r, x/c and x/f ranges on ALL streets, not just on flop. The status quo of hypers is that everyone is playing decently on preflop and flop, but still making tons of mistakes on later streets, which you might want to put serious work on. Also, your flop decision is never the flop decision only. If you see a certain flop, you have to automatically think how you are gonna play this hand throughout flop, turn and river, and act accordingly. This is what everyone seems to be talking about, but not necessarily having a clear idea of it. Another important thing, especially vs. regs but sometimes vs. fish as well, is to have a solid checking back range (when you're IP) on any street.

I can think of a few more specific examples, like our turn bluff x/r frequency being close to none, or pretty much always 3b jamming Ax regardless of stack depth and whatnot, but in the end it all boils down to our range construction. Like I said above, you probably cannot alter the fact that traffic is going down in hypers, but you can still work on certain spots to make more money. And yes, the spots I mentioned here are all about reciprocality, namely the ones where you can play differently from others and make money.

Out of hypers, I highly recommend you pick up another game than hypers as a sidekick at least. This is also about reciprocality, because if you are well versed in more games when everyone else is playing hypers only, you can get more action there and most likely making more money as well. I don't want to sound cocky, but I think HUSNG players tend to be doing very well when transitioning into other games. We constantly had to deal with wide ranges, put ourselves into tons of marginal spots, calculate the EV of very close decisions and take a superior one because they add up over time, all of which is a great asset to have as a poker player. No matter what you play, you will still get lots of heads-up spots and your skills will speak for themselves there.

That said, go ahead and try some other forms of poker today. MTT, PLO, mixed games, strip poker, whatever, just pick your favourite and see how it goes and how the action is. Personally I would recommend PLO than anything else, but that might just be my preference. Point is, don't stick to hypers all the time. Learning other game is basically a freeroll; you won't lose much by learning them, and there's a ton to gain. For example, I have been playing PLO since June 2012, and certain things I learned there greatly helped me improve my NL game as well. Likewise, I learned a lot about poker from MTTs and live NL cash and could apply it to my HUSNG or even PLO game, etc.

This turned out a bit longer than I thought, but there's nothing much I can do about it. I just hope my post made some sense to you, and if it made you think about it seriously, I would be more than pleased. I love poker, and meeting new people through it and interacting with them is one of the most wonderful and exciting experiences I've ever had in my life. I learned such a great deal about poker and life from you guys, so now's my turn to give something back to the community by clicking the "Post Quick Reply" button..

As always, thanks for reading this, and I wish you the very best luck at the tables. Please feel free to reply ITT or contact me for any questions or opinions you would have. I would greatly appreciate it. I'm so craving for sushi now, so you guys can probably guess what I'll have for dinner.

- mela

Thoughtful post and full insightful . Thanks for taking the time to put it down. Lots to think about!

mad props for writing all that, I stopped early on... but enjoy the sushi!