I had the opportunity to play against “the best” not so long ago, against players such as:
VBV1990
Jackstack99
Spacegravy

What was the results? Who is good, who is bad? Collusion? Politics? What mistakes did I do?
I will share the answers to those questions – but most importantly how I did it.

Lawboyy vs 1000$ [1.1%evROI]



My power-ranking of the HUSNG scene
1. VBV
...
... (these dots remarks a drop-off in skill)
...
2. Rams85
3. Niemelin
4. Razvanel/Andrechuvak
5. Luis Coppel
6. Jackstack
...
...
7. Spiritdreal
8. Grindation
...
...
...
9. Spacegravy
10. Ididntmeanit
*Based on a mixture of: experience playing them, tables, stamina, results in-between these guys
** Bluenowhere not in the ranking, due to lack of knowledge, but Id reckon he is in the middle of the pack

Backstory to the current hyper climate
In 2017 big banwaves hit which wiped bigger parts of the 1000$ and 500$ hyper cartels. This more or less lead to freeroll move-ups from the guys at the stakes under (200$ and 300$ became the new 500$). A few guys from 500$ got into the 1000$ cartel with less than 1000 games played, even when showcasing mediocre results. This is what formed todays cartels where basically weak and strong guys shares the lobbies together. Some guys basically haven’t battled at all, due to protection and promotion from their “stakers” (being a horse to the right guy or team is worth gold in this climate). Now to give credit where credit is due, to bumhunt and friendship your way to 10,20,30 and 40k a month-salaries is an impressive feat itself and shows for very skilled social intelligence – it just doesn’t score high in the power-ranking (therefore you can see the ones at the lower end of the powerranking as highly skilled in this art).

The misunderstanding of HUSNGs profitability
It has been a long trend of talks about HUSNG dying, being less profitable than spins, and so forth, and although the action becomes less there is upside that is being forgotten.

1. The misconception of good EVROI against fish.
Players has this theory about what evROI is possible against fish, and a good reg is “supposed to have 5-6-7%”. Some announce themselves as being the biggest fishcrushers, by showing numbers of 7 and 8%evROI.. Now if they only knew, that the best guys, silently prints 10-11%evROI– hereby DOUBLING the earnings from what their cartels friends are making. It is safe to say that there is a lot of HIDDEN money in HUSNG that a majority of the regs basically gives up, because they are mediocre fish players.
Is it easy to perform +8%evROI? Of course not, these guy worked very hard to attain these results, but its 2019 and there is a lot of technology and information nowadays to help people figure out how to crush as hard as possible. I am not referring to GTO-solvers – they will not give you 10%evROI against fish, because fish dont play close to GTO, and if you dont have a good evROI chances are that you dont really know how fish play, and how to exploit that real hard.

2. The pools got softer and sweeter. Nowadays there is only a few people that is in que, and since the skill-gap is so different, it makes a big difference if you que with somebody taking 10%evROI of each game, or somebody that take 3-4%.

3. Spins is a full-time grind. HUSNG leaves a lot of time, stuck by the computer, but still time to invest into other projects, while waiting around for whales to throw money in your already rich belly. It is hence a time-effective grind.

Fish evROI power-ranking
1. VBV/Rams85
2. Andrechuvak
3. IDiditmeanIt/Jackstack/Spiritdreal
…
The rest (3-6%)
*The data which this is based upon is a mixture of 2017 and 2019.


Shooting 1000$, I lacked experience, this was my second year as full time poker player. I lacked bankroll, only had money for one single shoot, so trying out and failing was not an option. Now the dream was always to play the best, and become a 1000$ reg. Even when I started playing 5$ hypers I was watching the lobbies of the high stakes, trying to learn. My opponents had experience, they had money, and it was me against everyone else. Not the easiest road, but my dream was aligned with these obstacles, so I had to try.

Im gonna let you in on a little secret – which may come as a big surprise. I did not run a single GTO solution 6 months prior to me starting to battle, nor did I study with PIO, instaGTO or anything of the kind during my entire shot. I even livestreamed a major part of the shoot, due to cheating accusations from a few opponents.
Reality: F#CKGTO = 1.1evROI.. In a world where everybody is consumed by it.

I do have solid GTO understanding, so I am not by any means stating that it is unrelevant.

Now there is three big advantages that gave me edge.

1. Information advantage

-Superior HUD
Prior to shooting I built myself a very advanced HUD that basically gave me opportunity to exploit leaks that my opponents would not see in their less-advanced HUD, or that it would take a long time to realize. Most of these old school guys sit with the worst tech, to see this firsthand check out jackstacks PT4 HUD from 2000 B.C on his twitch.



-Comprehensive analytical tools
6 months ago, while I still dabbling in spins I built my own postflop population tendency database for spins and heads up. This was a huge project which amounted to thousands of hours of hard work and programming. It made me learn exactly how population (reg/fish) plays postflop – in every single line. This gave me 4 years of poker experience in once single program, and therefore closed the experience-gap my opponents had on me.

With this system I could setup lines where my opponents would make huge deviations from GTO.



*The upside of playing spins for a couple of years, meant that I had a lot of data to analyze

Across the years I worked very hard to build the best preflop charts imaginable, again, with the aspect of exploiting, but also taking into account GTO (preflop is insanely complicated when it comes to the theory aspect).



*After years of work and changes I can recall my Heads Up REG preflop charts from memory with 80-85% accuracy – This made me gain edge against the best pre, and based on what I saw some of my opponents had gotten really lazy in this area.

2. The Maxexploit theorem

My approach to this game is to not convert to GTO, but to maximally try to exploit my opponent, in every spot I find any reason to do so. My goal has never been to balance my bet sizes, bluff/value-ratios or freqs – of any sort.

Does this mean I don’t care about such things?
On the contrary, I am very aware of what my opponent sees in my FREQS and bet sizes. I analyze my own HUD more so than my opponents after every session – but I do not ask myself what is the GTO-way – only what I think is good against my opponent.

3. Dynamic exploits

This is a very sensitive subject, due to its nature of being very private and unattainable in todays climate, so I will keep this short, but add that I have collected a ton of experience when it comes to dynamics, and keep doing so everyday.

-Timeing tells (the effectiveness of this varies against each opponent, but the nature of it is real) This was something I think I managed to successfully use against VBV, however I suspect Jackstack managed to use it against me.. You win some you lose some.
-Board textures. People think they are reacting back to GTO, but there is a lot of boards where they deviate based on bad experiences (negative emotional connection), especially in spots where it is “close” between two actions.
-Selective memory. There is loads of spots, where what happened in prior hands, pushes the opponent to think in biased ways (especially about bet sizes, and bluffing/valuebetting boards). My favorite notetaking consists of “saw me valuebet/bluff big in this line”. Everytime I see such a note I just reverse my playing style..

What has to be realized is that people might try to play a GTO-playing style across the game-tree, but that doesn’t mean that people actually are GTO in invidual spots, especially when 1000$ is on the line in a river all in spot.

Results against individual players (from their perspective):

VBV1990


Jackstack99


Spacegracy


*These where the players I had the most volume against
**Playing against Jackstack is a game of patience as every game takes 2.5 the speed of playing a normal game, and highly affects the volume.

Politics? Collusion?
Poker-skill is only a small fraction of the world of HUSNG. Equally important is the skill of knowing how to politically navigate the landscape. Being connected with the right people, hence getting an “endorsement” can be of great value – for example some seats basically got given out for free, not so long ago, solely upon being staked by the right guy. It could also be a downfall, if connected by the wrong people, or if there is a Judas in your circle.
On the topic of collusion, I do not know much more than specific players have direct friendships with Pokerstars security employees – if this is actively being abused, or is just neutral friendships, I do not know. But a good rule of thumb would be to find out who those players are and not press those players, it might come back to bite you.

Cheating?
Some light cheating is probably going on here and there, NASH chart, a few preflop charts on the wall etc. (lets not forget pokerstars changes their policies every quarter) – but I would not be to worried about running into fully-loaded GTO-bots. In a 1v1 it is much easier to find these players, and it seems pokerstars is doing a good job wipeing them.
When it comes to the spins (250+) I suspect 2-3 players have some really advanced high tech cheating systems going for them – and id be more cautious with who I am playing against.
If something is too good to be true… it most probably is.

Lessons from my mistakes
I did a lot of mistakes in my shoot, and here is a freeroll to learn from:
1. Do not play multiple players simultaneously
2. Do not swap around multiple players to much (focus in on 1-2-3 targets – do not jump on a 4th guy without a deeply constructed game plan, only because 1-2-3 is not showing up in time)
3. Always ask yourself IF… and make sure you are not getting exploited in any way. If you are, can it be used to your advantage?
4. Do not give in to your opponent strengths (Example: If opponent is good at multi-tabling, you don’t load up more than you can handle)
5. Consistently work on improving and crush harder (When I was up 50.000$ in EV I got cooky, and started to work less outside the game, and fall victim to upper mistakes as well – it immediately hit me back).
6. Have a good player analyze your game/coach you (perspective is important)

This is just a brief introduction to the world of HUSNG and my journey. If something needs further elaboration, explanation or correction, I will do so in further posts within this thread.

Lawboyy

So you did not get in?

didnt they tell you there are no free spots in 1k cartel from the start?

It was, is, and will be just a business/politics, every cartel has weak players that are on par to someone good on 5x or 10x lower stakes. They have bankroll, they have numbers, they dont care and can battle you forever even if losing $.

its quite funny that cartels exist in 2019, year where stars forbids simple nash chart. Blind lobbies/pools (+security team analysis of frequency of opponents, so they dont just queue with other tools) and ban of sharky should've happened few years ago

He's usually reading a Tony Robbins book while grinding.

How can you talk about crushing when you've only played 22k hands in a 25bb structure.
Where in one moment when it comes pushfold you have 0 edge vs any reg.
You played very, very little games to draw any conclusions or ratings.

Once I watching your stream and was surprised, I saw on a wall PioSOLVER preflop chart.
And you literally turn back sometimes and make decisions based on this.
At first I thought it was a joke, because it was the most discussed topic, the prohibition of any charts on PokerStars.
But it wasn't a joke.
Only for this stream you could get banned from PokerStars or at least a warning.

Cool contradiction.

The best way to crush regs is play close as much to GTO.
And it's easy to prove if you open any GTO trainer and play against it.
Your EV graph will go straight down.
And don't need any exploits, who study more and paid time GTO, the winner is the one, it's simple.

You writing like a GTO boss, but you just wrote that 6 months didn't run any GTO solution.

*see the pic. : xxB 55% [GTO 34%], actual GTO SB river delay is 46%(from skierDB) not 34%

-----

Honestly, it looks like you want to seem cooler than you really are.
Don't know what your motivation was to write it all.
Maybe it is just a story.
Or maybe you are frozen on stars and it is a additional facts of your career.
But you have a lot of contradictions and discrepancies.

It is not that bad. Last months four people got into 1ks

I have Push/Fold charts on my wall, according and in line with Pokerstars ToS.

Since my opponents is not playing GTO, it is not in the best interest to play GTO. We are not computers, and we do not play like computers, even if we try to there will be lines and spots and dynamics that we will deviate from. I know you feel very strong about these things, but the reality is that the complexity of the gametree leads to people playing pseudo-GTO at best. It is all about figuring out in which lines opponents deviate, and to deviate accordingly, more than anything.

This shows what is needed now to play those stakes.

1. Great skill/talent/knowledge + work ethic
2. Unwavering confidence
3. Good “social” or “politics” skills
4. A ridiculously huge bankroll

Seems like you may have had the first 2. But not the last 2. Props for being +EV in that small sample though.

is having call vs jam range against tos?

How do you know that 69cbet is winning more EV than optimal gto freq?

Given that stars recently banned from huds simple Nash charts, I am very curious what kind of push/fold chartS (****ing plural) they allow on the wall. But hey, you learn something new every day.

They probably also allow the software assistance you are using.

What makes VBV top1 with so much skill gap between top2-3?

Interesting read and impressive results for a spinner against the top HU regs. Also thanks for sharing some HUD stats that you have. I will add some of your stats as well to my HUD.

Looks like your results started to slip towards the end. Do you think people figured some leaks you may have had towards the end? Based on redline it seems like both VbV and jackstack started to amp up aggression against you after about 100 games and it started to negatively affect your EV.

GTO is only the best way to play when playing against a computer, or when lacking reads, since there isn't a human who can replicate GTO.

This fairly clear if you run a SPF solution and make other player even slightly deviate it will radically change the optimal strategy. Also if you look at the EV's in SPF the EV swings are pretty big when you can use exploitative lines against an unbalanced opponent.

The ~50% bet frequency with xxB and BxB lines on the river seem fairly ordinary to me. Do you know what the actual GTO frequencies would be?

Im looking at that graph and Im heaving trouble figuring out how is that 1.1% ev roi? You are still losing to rake.
And I totally agree with FREEQONE, you cant talk about crushing after 1.9k tournaments played.
I could find similar game stretch from fish pov vs me and make similar post how to get crushed by fish while in reality its just bad variance.
Imo 1.9k games proves nothing. You lost 15k chips in last 350-400 games, get another run like that and you are in red and you cant even make a post how to be up in chips.

And I also kinda disagree with you on good ev roi vs fish.
Back in a day when everyone was on sharkscope you just couldn't find 10% over big samples, like 50k+games, the most people got was 7-8% and even than it was like 5 people max(and there were a ton of people playing) and playing very few tables and games selecting even among fish.
While I could agree that 10-11% is possible but you have to be on top of your game all the time, + you just cant play a lot of tables, while yeah technology helps in improving peoples fish game, in this age you also cant game select that well, and there is plenty of alright fish which just wont lose much vs you.
I will never believe someone could show me 10% ev roi graph over very large sample.

Im not trying to say you cant beat 1k regs, all im saying you are greatly underestimating variance in poker, and such a tiny sample size cant be used as proof you winning.

I think my end results in the end is fault of my own, I got a bit lazy with staying on top of my game since everything was going so well, and actually Id say it was my aggression that decreased, rather than theirs. Also playing styles will affect red lines.

BxB in GTO is:
MR - 39-41
LIMP - 35-37

xxB in GTO is:
MR - 45-53
LIMP - 45

(I double checked the xxB, and yeah my previous GTO number was wrong - like FREQ pointed out).. These numbers will change slightly.

I think humans are professionals at blaming circumstances outside of their control (in this case variance, and sample). I built something I call a variance calculator within my HUD, letting me see my own card distribution on every single street and position, which I then compare with a huge sample - and calculate if I run good or bad or even with cards.. Of course this is not bulletproof, but it does give a better understanding of the so called variance. Now it is up to the reader to insert whatever beliefs he or she chooses about sample and variance.

In sharkscope you cant filter for regs and fish exclusively right? So makes sense you would never find 10% evROI guy when looking there. But there is, and I am not saying many people do that it is just a few. People seem to be happy with 5-6-7% and my point is that it is not something that anyone, as a hyper player should be satisfied with.. If the goal is to make money.

Does your own card distribution even matter if it doesn't take into account your opponent's?

You again wrong and your numbers incorrect.

You could know as a exploiting fan, that "These numbers will change slightly" also wrong understanding of the situation.
Did you nodelock any GTO solution?
-Spoiler-
There enough to 3-5% of frequency deviation to force solver make 80-100% actions.

So 34% and 46% not even close slight deviation.
+12% or -12% in any action line is a very huge deviation and very far from GTO.
Even if you LOCK preflop and change 5% of initial GTO range, all picture will change significantly.
You given xxB MR freq range 45-53%...

Therefore, I do not understand how you position yourself as an expert in the exploit and GTO, but do not understand such basic things.
And saying that some of the frequencies change slightly.

Yes of course. My cards would be 50% of the total distribution. Additionally I can also use my variance calc. to look at showdowns from villain, so lets say it would be 66% of total card. Addtinioally I also can see and take into account any cooler-cooler situations.

Id compare it with a compass. It tells the direction, and although the compass is very sensitive to any movements, it gives you a good sense on where you are going.

Im looking at that graph and Im heaving trouble figuring out how is that 1.1% ev roi? You are still losing to rake.

^ Any response to this?

According EV -4414,54 USD, no?

Isn't even 13x13 Nash push/call chart not allowed since March 2019?

In my experience its other way around, people use small samples and variance to brag way more than to justify their bad run.
I could count on one hand how many times I have seen someone posting bad graph blaming variance but I have seen countless times someone posting 200 games sample showing how he is crushing other guy and how bad he is.
I have seen some crazy things over years, so Im very skeptical of small samples.

Sure I agree with this when it comes to posting and more public references. Lets just say people more quietly blames variance.

MANUAL how to crush 1000$s regs....and you have a 1.9k sample size

Hilarious

I really support you mate to beat them, I like these stories (Bali guys etc) but come on, this is a joke

Your off-the-table work is very impressive though

Hey I like your range chart software. My question is, with the new rules on stars are we allowed to have our own ranges in a software like that to make it easier for us to remember what to do? Assuming they are not GTO/Nash charts but just ranges that we made ourselves with little to no mixing? Or do we have to memorize or have them on a physical paper or whatever?

you need to memorize them

There is more samples where I perform similar or better results. When I was playing spins I had above 80 cEV for over 6000 games at 50s and above 60 on 100s across 2000 games.. Then I moved over to Hypers.

LOL

So I still hear smacktalk about me cheating to beat these guys and whatnot. All HH I played on 1000s on stars (some jan hands might be missing etc). I dont quite get it, how would I go about doing that exactly?

https://gofile.io/?c=zsMwDF

PS. If you have access to instaGTO you can run the hands in the BOT-detector-tool to see how far away from a solver any or all hands are.

There is a really funny hand where I thought I exploitably folded the sickest 2nd nuts against VBV and he told me he had 3rd nuts, in a Raise/Raise/Raise turn. The GTO-gods cried that day.

Inbefore 'Yeah but what about this sample or on this site'. Specify the time, opponent and place and I am sure I can find the HH in my databases.

Still plenty of money in reg-crushing thats for sure