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heads up sng's
Thinking of giving these a go so just looking for some advice.
Brm - 40 buyins enough? More for higher speeds?
Speed - best to start at slower speed games then working up?
Multitabling - I play 6 dyms/mtts normally but can play up to 10-12 at a push. What should I aim to build up to?
Roi/win % - what roi can winning players get in long term? And what % of games would a good winning reg hope to achieve?
Time - roughly how long do games take on average at the various speeds
Sky -what's traffic like? Rake compared to other sites?
And anything else you think would be worth knowing, etiquette things etc
Cheers
Jd
Comments
should be ample, but in hypers with the rake here you might want more like 60-80. the slower the format the fewer BI's needed. but 40 seems like a reasonable amount if you have an edge
Speed - best to start at slower speed games then working up?
really depends this. personally i'd dive into the faster paced sng's. better players have a bigger edge with deeper stacks but you can get more games in with the faster paced. ultimately it will come down to what games you enjoy. edges remain pretty big at so called shallow stacks so dont fall into the trap of thinking hypers are a crap-shoot. they remain one of the most profitable variants of the game. player's profits have increased year on year since their inrtroduction even with poker traffic generally being in decline.
Multitabling - I play 6 dyms/mtts normally but can play up to 10-12 at a push. What should I aim to build up to?
i think diving into multi-tabling would be a mistake. you have to play VERY wide ranges and post flop, multi-steeet decisions will be common. more importantly a big chunk of edge will come from spotting villains tendencies and exploiting them.
start 1 tabling. seriously. build up from there as yiou see fit. you will be able to beat the recs across multiple tables. what you have to balance is whether the loss in ROI is made up for by an increase in your hourly winnings.
Roi/win % - what roi can winning players get in long term?
on sky anywhere between 2-4% in hypers / turbos and 4-8% in the slower formats would be attainable and sustainable. 53-55% winrate in hypers is considered to be very good.
Time - roughly how long do games take on average at the various speeds Sky
actual game time for hypers will be between 3-5mins average. however sky dont have a "i am ready" button which adds to the startup time.
what's traffic like? Rake compared to other sites?
traffic will be sluggish compared to stars and the rake is MUCH higher.
However the games are FAR FAR softer here. and you will struggle to establish yourself as a $30+ reg on stars [£20 bi here roughly] as the regs are organised into groups $30+ and you have to beat the beast regs over 1000sx of games to be allowed to join and opensit a lobby
also the $15 level on stars is reg infested. you need a program called sharkystrator to opensit the level and avoid regs. and everyone is using HUD's. games do fire off repidly on stars though. you have to balance volume + software v the softness and HUDless enviroment here.
the turbos on sky offer a great work-around in regard to rake. they play very close to hyper-turbos [50bb starting stack, but still 2min blinds] so the games still run very quickly - but you will have more edge at those crucial deeper stacked minutes. so its a great balance.
most other sites offer lower rake on hypers as they are lower edge, sky dont, but sky's turbo structure + rake offers great value imo.
And anything else you think would be worth knowing, etiquette things etc
the lobbies can get political, people can take things personally so just promote a cool playing enviroment and dont get involved in the nonsense.
there will be moral quandries in regards to people being disconnected. some people will wait for people to come back, some will blind-out everyone, some wont blind out regs but will unkowns. again there is no set-etiquette other than if someone is nice enough to wait for you its good to take a note and return the favour.
it might be in your interests to share lobbies with good players, but if you see someone you have an edge over open-sitting dont worry about sitting them.
open-sitting gives you the best chance of playing a recreational player hence the issue over sharing lobbies. so always open-sit if you can.
good luck, if you need any help give us a shout
HUSNG's are the nuts imo. they never get boring and are often intense battles.
very best of luck mate.,
As for multi-tabling - Teddy is right that HU is a different ball game completely and requires complete focus at least to begin with. When I started out this week I was playing 3, sometimes 4 tables plus a DYM on the side. Was pretty hectic to say the least so I cut down to 2 hypers and 2 dym's. That was much more manageable for me but then I did used to play HU cash so it didn't take me too long to get to grips with ranges in HU play again.
Right now 2 is very comfortable and 3 is pretty comfortable too. What Teddy didn't mention that I thought is pretty important is the difference between playing the same opponent and different opponents. If I was playing the same opponent on all 4 tables I could manage it OK. 3 tables would be v comfortable. We can work out a game plan and apply it across all tables. But if were playing 4 or 3 different opponents across 4 or 3 tables then there are a lot less automatic decisions since what you do on one table with one hand/range might be different from what you want to do on another with the same hand/range.
Hypers are definitely the most fun - lots of shoving! Plenty of people don't call enough or shove enough too in hypers (or I'm guessing in normal SNG's when stack depths get less than 12bb's) so you can gain a massive edge just from blinding players down who will just fold a lot!
When it comes to shove/call ranges nash is useful as a guide but generally only to employ it less than 12bb's since there is more value to be played by limping or min-r and seeing a flop. Also b/c lots of players don't shove enough or employ nash <12bb's like they should (ie. they'll fold hands which are +ev to ship) then you should tighten your calling range. eg. It says A2o is a call 15bb's deep but vs lots it will be a fold. Say a hand says you can call at 7bb's deep vs shove, against a tight ship range you might want to fold at 7bb's and only call if your between 5 and 6bb's.
Rake on hypers is 5%. Don't know if that's good/bad? Is stars really less Teddy even after their changes to rake recently? I guess if you get priority and decent rakeback it's OK. Don't know what traffic is like on sky. Has been decent for promo plus lots of rec's tend to play from 5/6 onwards. This is hypers tho which I guess is quite appealing to lots of rec's. Not too sure about slower games.
Etiquette - yeah, Teddy covers OK. Annoyingly I've lost 3/4 games due to being blinded out. All REC's that blinded me out. Had a REG wait for a bit. I tend to let the time bar go down quite far before folding OTB. (unless I have a premium hand OTB then I just can't fold!!) I'll wait a couple mins vs a REG (one blind level). In non-hypers this would be longer but in a hyper I just don't want to wait around and lose all the edge from SS poker cause then I'm just paying rake w/o prob being +ev myself. When I'm waiting I'll get a chip edge of no more than 600-400... think it's only fair if you wait you should get some advantage and that seems fair enough to me.
Type of hand you have is important cause a hand like K4o will perform better as a ship at 8bb's deep whereas T9s will obv perform much better as a limp as long as you think the rec will check behind lots. If you're thinking about folding a hand pre-flop, that's when nash does become useful.
I don't follow your last paragraph - what hands are snap calls vs shove 24bb deep but folds 10bb?!
From what I understand about nash it's the entire range that's unexploitable. But hands like QQ-AA are in that range and yet we wouldn't be open jamming with QQ-AA against 99% of villains. So does that not affect the Nash solution?
re. regs open jamming 22/33/44 and calling with 96s but folding at 10bb. I don't agree. Against a bad reg or rec unable to adjust then sure you can call a ship with 96s for 25bb's knowing they have 22-44 nearly always. All it takes is one adjustment and to open shove a couple of other hands and suddenly the call with 96s becomes really bad.
Going back to nash vs a strong reg. If we limp @ 12bb they suddenly have a ton of hands they can shove profitably according to nash (and playing OOP they'll surely have higher ev than if they saw a flop with most of these hands?). Where Q8o was a profitable jam it now becomes a fold. That's why it's important to at least start shipping some hands at this stack depth?
Anyway, mostly you shouldn't try to tangle with good reg's at least not on sky. Like you said rake is so high that it's just not worth it except as practice. Most of our profit comes from open sitting and hoping to get action from REC's.
yeah it sounded like you were playing NASH @ those depths. you've got the basic idea right there. just remember that many NASH shoves are only unexploitable within the NASH range.
re. regs open jamming 22/33/44 and calling with 96s but folding at 10bb. I don't agree. Against a bad reg or rec unable to adjust then sure you can call a ship with 96s for 25bb's knowing they have 22-44 nearly always. All it takes is one adjustment and to open shove a couple of other hands and suddenly the call with 96s becomes really bad.
yeah they can adjust, and you have to make counter adjustments, but readless you can make those so called light calls and be VERY happy doing so. their adjustments may be bad for your 97s, but you will win a lot of that ev back from other parts of your range and in the ev that he gives up v eg A8o [which may jam over a minraise but fold to shove] when he ships eg AKo to exploit you.
lets say he shoves AKo as well now, knowing that you call with 33+ strong Ax and a lot of suited connectors. great he gains v the suited connectors [but we still do ok v AK] but he folds out - and therefore loses ev compared to minraising - almost all Kx, most Ax [a lot of which would have GII pre to a minr] and a whole lot of stuff he is ahead of, IP deep. and pairs and strong Ax were going in anyway so no gains there,
shoving AK he now ends the hand with a stack of t524. the shove is 34 chips better than folding @ 10/20. its not a massive leap in expectation with AK and his minr range now has one of its most dominating hands removed. he has 86% fold equity pre flop with AK now. and if you stop making light calls him shoving AKo is a HUGE coup for you.
my point is that when constructing ranges the composition of the ranges matters much more than how wide / tight they are, we know this as we can formulate a very tight range [22-33] that can be called off by 96s and a very wide one [Ax, 22+, K7+ etc] that cannot.
Going back to nash vs a strong reg. If we limp @ 12bb they suddenly have a ton of hands they can shove profitably according to nash (and playing OOP they'll surely have higher ev than if they saw a flop with most of these hands?). Where Q8o was a profitable jam it now becomes a fold. That's why it's important to at least start shipping some hands at this stack depth?
NASH says nothing about jamming over limps. it is not applicable
not many regs will jam wide enough so that Q8o is not a profitable limp, and if they do, then they are sooo easy to exploit by limp / calling appropriately. at the equilibrium Q8o @ 12bb is 0.07bb better shoved than open folded. if you dont think you can do better IP with resonable SPR than 0.07bb better than folding then give up!
Q8o is a terrible shove @ 12bb. even against tight ranges it is going to a very similar ev to limping and you dampen down variance by limping. villain would have to be a massive nit v shoves to make shoving Q8o good at 12bb, and even then i wouldnt do it.
limp it, flat a NAI iso raise and fold to shove. easy game.
ship hands v regs yes. but you want them to be hands that are both profitable shoves and really benefit from the fold euity - ie they can fold out much better hands. Q8 doesnt fold out better 8x, it folds only a few better Qx and some Kx. 86s for example folds out hands that are ahead of it and dominating. [think of all the 9x, Tx, Jx, Kx better 6x, better 8x that is folding]. more accuratley shove hands that have a higher ev shoved than when limped, folded or minraised.
also its not good to be generally shoving off suit combos.
one of the reasons NASH 'likes' to shove suited combos as opposed to off-suit combos is that if it shoves too much junk then villain can exploit that by calling eg weaker kings, if it never shoves junk then it misses out on fold equity. so when 'deciding' on what junk to shove it 'picks' suited combos as they have better all-in equity.
basically if you are shoving all combos of Q8 then your shoving range is going to contain too much weak stuff. so when selecting which combos to jam you may as well pick the ones with better equity ei suited combos.
simplified, but hopefully you grasp what i mean.
btw you only need 45.8% equity to call a jam after a limp @ 12bb. you'll be surprised at what hands you can call off if villain jams bluffs along with Ax and low pairs.
Standards/ Speeds i would say 40bi is fine
Turbos i would say anywhere between 50bi-75bb min as the variance.
Hypers 200+bi is ideal at first as you will have to get used to losing 20-25bb fairly often and that can hurt alot when you have like 100bi and as ivan said even 50bi is not unusual, just this month so far i've had a 55b upswing and 39bi downswing although my volume was higher due to the promo and not being back at work first week of Jan, it's important to get used to the constant swings in HU especially at hypers.
Multitabling -
i've played up to 4 tables, albeit with a likely loss of edge. Two tables is ideal imo unless your playing a very good reg on one of the tables or a very tricky rec then i'll close and concentrate on that game. i would happily play 3-4 tables at lower stakes now so for example if you were grinding 5s and wanted to work on multitabling go and 3 table £1-£2 games to get used to it and then work in multitabling at your normal stakes. i liked the idea of multitabling as say for example a 1.5% roi 4 tabling is going to make more profit/rb than a 4% roi 1 tabling so the loss of edge can be justified. Although saying that i had already played thousands of games when i started to try multitabling so i think honing your instincts in adapting to opponents tendencies quickly is really important in adjusting to multitabling so maybe jumping into this early would be a bad idea get a few thousand games under your belt first.
Given the player pool on sky at hypers 3-5% maybe even 6% i believe is attainable on sky I'm +3% over 10k games at hypers since last jan, not many players grind hypers specifically i think there is maybe 6-7 regs max whose stats would fall into that category for hypers but its definitely attainable.
Traffic is good on sky for 5s and 10s pretty much get action any time in the evening and never be waiting round ages in the daytime.
It's sensible to share lobbys if you do not think its +ev to play an oppo but i would say there is barely a handful of people who regularly grind hu at the lower and medium stakes worth doing that with, i find the best way to go about it is open reg, rather than regging them specifically if they are sat and if they reg you just play them constantly if they offer rematch untill you gain there respect which you will eventually if you work hard on adapting and exploiting them. Be sure to challenge better players occasionally as it's always good for your game to be challenged in different ways, however ego wars can be hugely detrimental no point wasting time battling someone with a miniscule edge just to prove you are superior when you could be playing a typical reg who you will have a large edge over.
Thought about some things i wish someone had drummed into me when i first starting playing hypers and came up with this:
Block sharkscope/ avoid focusing on your balance paying attention to it: This has been huge over the past year i was one of the players who constantly checked my graph:roi and everytime i had a downswing it would hurt more than is should of, it's not nice if you want to see a straight line on scope and it suddenly dips aload and you think you have to make that money back. Try to set volume targets and check it i.e look at scope after 2k games or something along them lines.
Don't climb stakes and try to recoup losses, again done this time and time again throughout the first part of the year the worst time to take shots is during a horrid losing session (of which you will have a fair amount). However if you are on a massive heater and have crushed 10-15bi in an hour don't be afraid to take 2-3bi shot at the next stake up this can really help with bankroll growth if done sensibly.
Experience of losing and winning decent sums over and over again is the only way to become desensitized to individual sessions, you will have many times where you feel like you couldn't even beat someone if you saw there cards the whole game and feel sick to the stomach after donating them aload of buyins. Similarly you will heater so crazily against an oppo you will think you are going to crush poker forever and be rich, gradually you start to become more machine like due to the desensitization and whether you win a large amount or lose a large amount your emotions will remain closer and closer to neutral. Although it sounds as though it takes the fun out of winning, it is a massive point to reach in regards to constantly playing as close to your A game as possible without being affected by swings. Bankroll has a huge effect on this as well, a big roll for your stakes allows you to lose alot without taking much notice. I played with 75-100bi at alot of times and in reflection i feel it affected my game alot, whereas now i play with more than double that i feel alot more comfortable with losses and alot less carried away with winnings.
It's cliche and i used to just glaze over it when i was doing well enough to make a little money but not actually challenging and improving myself, but study is a huge thing for really progressing and doing well at hu. Since last january getting stuck into studying and discussing the game as much as possible has helped me improve loads which has shown in results. I speak to 2-3 players regularly who also play hu and this helps aload even if its just to vent about a player hitting miracle cards constantly, to discussing whether a 3bet jam is profitable against a specific opponent type. HUSNG.com has a huge amount of free videos that i've found incredibly helpful and also a free ebook which i read a couple of times and would say formed a solid fundamental basis to my game. Coaching is also an option i've had one session with a very good winning player on the site and this helped me no end in regards to a few tweaks that have helped me improve my roi.