Tyvm for sharing your thoughts with us. IMO that is a very mindful post you wrote there and I agree with pretty much every you wrote.

Very nice post, liked the analogies and your thoughts on the state of Husngs.

Nice post

So you're saying - no money hu, everyone's solid?

Joking, some good thoughts in your post, thanks for taking the time to write that down and gl with whatever you decide to play, PLO is definitely fun and I think there are a lot of money to be made there if you are solid, only thing is variance can hit you hard there, but what is variance for someone who's played hu hypers.

lucky i ate sushi a couple hours ago, otherwise i wouldn't have been able to finish the post.

I think you make some great points.

If no money in poker, you can always become a writer .

Thanks for your replies and kind words, guys. I'm glad that you found it interesting. And yes, I did end up eating sushi last night.

Like I said, I wasn't (and still am not) entirely sure about the validity of my arguments in the post above, so if there's any part you don't agree with, please feel free to chime in and tell us. I think I will be following up with some backups for quite a while, whenever necessary.

A couple things (pointed out by Ryan, many thanks to him)

- I said "there was no such thing as a waiting line" before sharky, which is not really true. I mean, by the very nature of the husng lobby system, there was always waiting, and the above sentence is a bit of hyperbole. I meant to emphasise the fact that while sharky helped us play fish without much effort through auto-reg, it also increased the waiting time in between. I'm sorry for any confusion or wrong impression this might have caused you.

- I decided not to talk about the husng leaderboard in my OP, because I found it a bit hasty to look at the top 25 or so players and draw conclusions about hypers in overall from there. However, I wouldn't mind sharing my thoughts on that either if readers show interest.

Hi there, I made a comment on the post in ur blog at triplemerge.com, but not sure if this is a good way to contact you. So I copy it here too:

I saw ur thread on 2p2 and this site too. As I understand u have read both TMGP’s and therefore you might be keen to check the website I am developing. http://pokerwarmup.com
Hope you find it interesting and can make use of it. Any feedback is highly appreciated, as its still pretty much in Beta testing.
Cheers, Michael.

Alright, here's a random hand that I played earlier today. It occurred to me I haven't posted HH in a while.

SB: $126.48
BB: $74.31
CO: $54.62
Hero (BTN): $104.72

SB posts SB $0.25, BB posts BB $0.50

Pre Flop: (pot: $0.75) Hero has 8 A A T

fold, Hero raises to $1.13, SB raises to $2.50, BB calls $2.00, Hero calls $1.37

Flop: ($7.50, 3 players) 5 K 4
SB bets $3.50, BB calls $3.50, Hero calls $3.50

Turn: ($18.00, 3 players) T
SB bets $8.50, fold, Hero raises to $26.00, SB calls $17.50

River: ($70.00, 2 players) 6
SB bets $20.00, Hero raises to $72.72 and is all-in, fold

Hero wins $108.50

Pre is obv misclick after SB's small 3bet, this guy was playing like 75/50/30 and I'd even 4b with KKxx/QQxx here because well, I'm ahead of his 5betting range.

Flop is standard either way, I think I can raise here after BB cold called but we are a bit too deep and I don't really wanna waste this much equity, including the NF blocker. My plan is to bluff on pretty much any diamond turn, and just call down on spade turn.

Turn is one of the good cards in the deck besides Ac/Ah. Qd/Jd woulda been slightly better because now he can have J/T high flush at best, and it's far easier to fold those out by raising turn than Q high flush. But anyway, I stick to my plan and raise, which he snap calls.

River he snap donked small, and to me this seems like lots of weak flush and sometimes set or 2p like KK/KT (although I block some Tx). I thought anything but shoving is bad once I got to the river this way, so I shoved and he tank folded.

PLO is fun. I can't recall the last time I could bluff with NF blocker in NL to fold out flushes. Boo.

Having some terrible migraines, but hopefully it will go away when I wake up. I'll try to grind lots of PLO today, and maybe some MTT's as well.

solid post up there, and nice hand too

re waiting time: Yeah sure, there has been always waiting but nowadays it is getting absurd with 30+ ppl in the queue. From my POV thanks to sharky ppl battling way less for lobbies which is pretty bad for the mid-/longterm health of the game.

re husng leaderboard: I would love to read your thoughts about that topic as well as I think there are some false conclusions drawn from it about the state of the game.

One more interesting topic imo is the coming (?) implementation of a battlenet system. I think that change will have a huge negative impact to hyper HUSNGs.

I'm on the train and have nothing else to do, so I think I can touch on the leaderboard thing briefly. Looking at my earlier post I just sigh to myself, "what a tl; dr post" so I'll try to make it short this time.

I think it is safe to say that the Sharkscope leaderboard is a good measure, maybe the best out there, for understanding the status quo of hypers and its change over time. It has some fallacies, but let's first take a quick look at the 2012 and 2013 leaderboards at 3 different stakes, namely $16-35, $36-100, and $101-300.

$16-35 (profit of 2012 / 2013, respectively, as of 31/10/2013)

1 $29,311 / $46,580
2 $25,190 / $39,666
3 $24,827 / $31,682
4 $23,752 / $28,142
5 $21,816 / $22,922
6 $18,865 / $22,797
7 $16,704 / $22,657
8 $16,180 / $22,454
9 $14,356 / $22,309
10 $14,190 / $21,311
11 $14,180 / $20,372
12 $13,998 / $19,843
13 $13,738 / $19,278
14 $13,728 / $18,663
15 $12,531 / $18,642
16 $11,960 / $18,527
17 $11,249 / $18,515
18 $10,955 / $18,096
19 $10,925 / $17,822
20 $10,865 / $17,740

Avg profit: $16,466 (2012), $23,401 (2013)

Since we have 2 more months left, we can multiply $23,401 by 1.2 = $28,081. So hypers at this stake has been a lot more profitable this year, almost by a factor of 1.7.

$36-100

1 $96,860 / $84,981
2 $69,539 / $71,007
3 $69,094 / $66,880
4 $68,665 / $64,095
5 $67,738 / $64,018
6 $66,134 / $61,559
7 $65,581 / $59,493
8 $62,846 / $57,826
9 $62,377 / $56,612
10 $57,759 / $55,484
11 $56,239 / $54,324
12 $55,938 / $54,059
13 $55,289 / $52,168
14 $53,906 / $51,849
15 $53,174 / $48,198
16 $51,853 / $48,005
17 $51,171 / $47,265
18 $51,128 / $46,182
19 $50,310 / $45,172
20 $48,806 / $44,981

Avg profit: $60,720 (2012), $56,708 (2013)

Likewise, $56,708 * 1.2 = $68,049. So the year 2013 is about 1.12 times better than the year 2012.

Now, at $101-300:

1 $306,301 / $135,047
2 $278,236 / $101,985
3 $254,875 / $92,907
4 $160,356 / $92,748
5 $127,575 / $72,422
6 $119,591 / $71,535
7 $115,798 / $59,893
8 $113,111 / $45,791
9 $93,353 / $43,712
10 $86,565 / $42,608
11 $81,687 / $40,401
12 $79,340 / $36,975
13 $77,119 / $36,737
14 $73,323 / $34,700
15 $69,833 / $33,679
16 $64,756 / $31,035
17 $62,081 / $29,351
18 $58,485 / $28,754
19 $56,848 / $28,332
20 $55,722 / $27,480

Avg profit: $116,748 (2012), $54,305 (2013). $54,305 * 1.2 = $65,166, and at this stake we see that the avg profit almost halved since the last year.

Before proceeding, we can make a few (somewhat hasty) conclusions:

- At micro and low ($15-100) stakes, the traffic and profit for the top 20 players have increased by quite a bit. Sharky must have played a huge role, and hypers presumably got more popular among fish too.

- At mid/high stakes ($101-300), the profit for the top 20 players have significantly decreased. A part of it might be the inevitable reg battle at this stake, but it's quite possible that the overall traffic has decreased too. Fish don't play at this stake as much as they do at $15-100.

- Very few players can make $100k+ a year at $60s and $100s, and $50k+ a year at < $30s. Actually, even at $200s-300s, we have only 8 players who made $100k+ last year, and probably 4-5 in this year.

- $100k and $50k are just random numbers I picked, but I think you get the point. Breaking it through the top 20 in hypers shouldn't be easy and requires a lot of work and dedication.. and tbh I think you can make about the same money, if not more, in other games with this amount of work. Don't get me wrong, I have tons of respects for my fellow HUSNG grinders, but I also think you should be able to get paid off a bit more than this.

I haven't done the analysis for $301-1,000 hypers because I'm feeling lazy, but it should be fairly straightforward to do this in like 5 min. Spoiler alert: this year doesn't look all that brighter than the last year at this stake.

Now let me talk about some fallacies of this leaderboard thing, in no specific order.

- We have missing players in the leaderboard, mostly because they opted out. For this reason I could have chosen pokeroptimizer instead of SS leaderboard but w/e, I doubt that will have much difference tbh

- This should be fairly obvious, but the top 20 players don't tell you the whole story about the status of hypers. For example, the fact that we have a >$1M winner in this year doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things.. it's rather the exception than the rule. Likewise, the amount of money made by these top 20 players don't really represent the game and regulars as a whole, either. If you look at these numbers and think you can easily make this much too, you're not much different from someone who listens to a virtuoso playing the piano and says "well I have 10 fingers just like him, so I can do that too." Oh well.

- For similar reasons, the leaderboard doesn't quite reflect the traffic change very well. First off, some of these top players don't mind reg wars and can maintain the volume that way, whereas for "normal" regs that's not desirable nor doable without hurting their ROI by much. Not to mention that they usually have gained respect from other regs, so they don't get sat that much either. Secondly, the hyper traffic changes every month, if not every 2 weeks.

This year has been a bit funny. During the first couple of months everyone was playing a plenty of fish thanks to sharky, but then at some point we started having 30+ regs waiting in the line, which for sure decreased the traffic. Once again, hypers are all about volume and hourly, so it's really crucial to be able to estimate that accurately, and SS leaderboard is not that reliable imo. At any rate, it would be reasonable to expect that the traffic will keep getting worse at pretty much all stakes (maybe it doesn't matter that much at $30s and below, idk), and although certain regs might be able to make $$$ no matter what, the total amount of $$ we all can make will inevitably decrease. We have a smaller pie now, that's why. It's that simple.

CLIFF:

- Hypers are getting worse at $100s+
- There seems to be more money at $60s- but not really, the traffic is getting really bad and it will go back down again imo
- Very few players can make $100k+ a year by playing hypers up to $300s
- It can even be worse in reality for normal/mediocre regs
- Don't stick to hypers, learn other games too and profit

As always, thanks for reading this guys. Please feel free to say anything or ask any question about this. I'll try my best to answer to them

- mela

Thanks man! I hope things are going well for you.

Yeah, waiting time is ridiculous for the most time. And the idea of battlenet is beyond ******ed, I don't even know where to start from.

well summarized

gl in PLO!

I enjoyed reading this, thanks for taking so much effort into this!

get a cooling mask for face if you have migranes/headaches a few times

Thanks, gl to you as well!

Thanks man, glad to hear!

Oh I haven't really tried this one, thanks for the tip. Yeah it makes sense because I feel like my face and brain are like burning whenever I have migraines. Will try it next time!

2013 Goal:

- Build a comfortable roll for 1/2 PLO and settle there
- Improve
- Buy a car (?)

Only two months left, huh?

What's the average monthly/yearly number of tournaments played for these guys? For some reason my sharkscope was acting up whenever I tried to load that stat.


And how much monthly grinding (in hours) do you reckon that's be on average?

I'm a lazy person, so I only looked at the top 20 players of the $36-100 leaderboard. But you can easily repeat the same procedure for higher stakes too

The avg number of the games they played this year was 20,505 (median = 19,333). Maximum was ~35k, minimum was 13k.

In terms of grinding hours it really depends, because different regs play different # of tables. I would think you can get ~30 games if you 4 table and game select (I might be wrong here), in which case 20,505 games corresponds to about 700 hours. If you can get only 20 games per hour, this becomes about 1k hours.

1k hours, for rougly 65 or 70k worth of profit incl. rakeback, that's 70$ an hour.

It is also about 3.5 hrs per day, for about 7k monthly profit.

Not too shabby.

Yeah it's not too bad, as a rule of thumb the top players will make ~1BI/hr and that's a decent amount of money at $60+.

Once again, this heavily depends on their multi tabling skills, which is something that we cannot easily deduce from sharkscope stats. Not to belittle these players or anything, but it is probably safe to assume that most of them aren't 4+ tabling for the most part, and are playing anywhere between 20 to 30 games an hour.

Tricky thing is, as the waiting list got longer nowadays, the # of games they can get per hour might be decreasing. I just don't know by how much it is decreasing though, so can't really comment much on that.

However, worth mentioning is the fact that most of these players have played about < 100 games a day, and while that might seem to indicate "these guys are lazy" at the first glance, I really don't think the top 20 players are unanimously lazy or slacking. 100 games a day is about 3-4 hours of playing everyday, and I'm sure there are players, especially full-time ones, who play more than that. That leads me to believe the actual hourly might be slightly lower, but these are just assumptions and I cannot be too sure.

Playing 6-9 tables of PLO these days. Poker is so much fun again, I don't think I'll come back to hypers like ever again. Who knows, ask me again in a couple months, but at least that's what I'm thinking now.

I didn't expect I had this much equity on the turn. That 2 on the turn helped me a ton, which is kind of rare. :O

CO: $20.50
BTN: $115.01
SB: $152.54
Hero (BB): $50.00
UTG: $52.86
MP: $26.24

SB posts SB $0.25, Hero posts BB $0.50

Pre Flop: (pot: $0.75) Hero has K A J 2

fold, fold, fold, BTN raises to $1.50, SB raises to $5.00, Hero calls $4.50, BTN calls $3.50

Flop: ($15.00, 3 players) 4 T Q
SB bets $9.00, Hero raises to $41.32, fold, SB calls $32.32

Turn: ($97.64, 2 players) 2
SB bets $71.50, Hero calls $3.68 and is all-in

River: ($105.00, 2 players) 6
Players agreed to run it twice.

River #2: ($105.00, 2 players) Q

SB shows K J A 9 (High Card, Ace)Board #1 (Pre 49%, Flop 35%, Turn 16%)Board #2 (Pre 50%, Flop 35%, Turn 16%)
Hero shows K A J 2 (Flush, Jack High)Board #1 (Pre 51%, Flop 65%, Turn 84%)Board #2 (Pre 50%, Flop 65%, Turn 84%)
Hero wins $51.25
Hero wins $51.25

As you like to talk strat; maybe it is time to make a vid pack and then rake in coaching for months to go ...