Hype For Hypers!

Well its been a while since I did a poker blog, so much so that its probably not as clear whether I'm still playing or not. Well I am, but last month I decided to finally end my run at the Turbo STTs and move to Hyper STTs.

HELLO HYPER TURBOS

Welcome to the crazy world of Pokerstars Hyper Turbo Sit and Go's! These are 9 man games, top 3 get paid and blinds are a super fast 2 minutes long! You start with 500 chips, which is 25 big blinds, and blinds have antes from the get go! If you love going all in all the time, maybe this is the game for you!!

Its quite funny because I've come full circle from when I started playing online. When I started I actually grinded Full Tilt's Super Turbos when I managed to get rakeback for my account, and basically was breakeven and made my money through that. Super Turbos were 300 chips, and 2 minute blind shovefests too.. so crazy! But there was no ante.

The next year I decided to go for Pokerstars Turbos Single Table Tournaments, and with my Poker VT account managed to stay breakeven haha. With that I decided to hire a coach who was awesome at the games and did a ton of work with him. The year after that I tried my hand at 180 man tournaments, but soon realised I didn't like the long sessions and found I couldn't keep concentration. So last year, I "bounced" back to Turbo STTs, and also decided that I'd be happy with some rakeback, so it was a target of mine to get back Supernova. More staking coaching deals, and more studying prevailed. Last month, out of staking and on my own dosh, I made the jump to hypers. My turbos haven't been great results but man have I learned a lot from the best guys. Really thanks to them for putting up with a newbie like me probably annoying them all the time asking tons of questions. A lot of the stuff is so helpful now in hypers. 

Misconceptions about Hyper Turbos;

• There is no post flop play.
• You cannot raise/fold.
• It is a shovefest, so therefore there is no skill or strategy.
• It reg infested and therefore not a profitable game

What I didn't realise was that there was less rake in these games, meaning more money in the prize pool. In fact the prize pool was comparable to the old $16 Turbo STTs before they changed it. A win in a hyper gives you about 4 buy ins back, compared to the current turbos where it is only 3. However, because there is less rake, the ability to earn a lot more VPPs is less then the turbos. So there is some give/take.

Even Ronaldo loves these games! How can you argue with that?!

Call Yourself A Professional?

A friend of mine who used to play poker online was chatting to me the other day on facebook and something he said really resonated with me. He said, "The one thing I regret about back then is that I didn't treat it like a professional."

Then I thought... well actually am I? Probably not when you compare it to the other great players around. In fact what a lot of people don't realise is how hard some of the top top guys work, especially in studying off the tables. If I was working 9-5 in an office, I should theoretically dedicate the same amount of time to studying and working. 

I dunno where I heard the quote from but its so true. "Once you stop learning and trying to improve, it'll come back and bite you in the ass". For sure this was a big leak in my game. I had come back to STTs last year and thought that I knew it all, and thought that they were easy games. What is shocking to me is how much I didn't know, and how far away I was from the best. Now I'm more motivated then ever to keep improving and learn to be better and better. With that attitude the results will come.

So a few weeks I decided to do a Poker Diary. Every session I would mark some problem hands and then check it the day after before my session. This would help "warm me up" and get me ready to play. I'd write down my findings and maybe some other thoughts I had. I probably wouldn't even read it later on, but the point was to write that stuff down to solidify my workings out and also as a type of therapeutic evaluation.

So far this has helped me a lot, especially in these games where there can be a lot of very strange bubble situations since everyone can be so short stacked.

As a pro its hard to organize yourself because you just have too much free time. So creating a structure and a schedule is all up to you. Having something like this is great because it adds to that timetabling of things to do, instead of just jumping straight into the tables. So far things have been going well, but I'm not holding my breath, these games are high variance and I just want to concentrate on playing well whether I run good or bad.

July Results. Started out playing lesser tables to get used to things and the structure. Now sticking to 16 tabling.

Hopefully August can be good too. Hopefully I can keep the same focus and motivation.

And to end, probably one of the worst bad beats in history, in the 2nd One Million Dollar buy in for the One Drop at WSOP. 2% chance still happens but you just hope its not at a point where its super important!