My general perception (from playing a little bit of zoom 6 max on my tablet sometimes) is that fast fold variants tend to attract a very nitty straight forward fit or fold player pool.

Makes for a pretty boring poker game imo but I guess you could grind out a small profit if the rake isn't too high.

Personally these formats don't really appeal to me.

I think most of the skill factor in poker comes from your ability to:

- collect information on your opponent(s) and identify imbalances in frequencies

- integrate that information to exploit weaknesses in your opponents' game(s)

In a game where your opponent(s) changes every hand it makes keeping track of such things more difficult.

Wrt to comparing to hypers => it's probably similar wrt developing a readless strategy.

In hypers you never really have enough info on your opponent to have very strong reads about how they play unless you have played a lot together.

So smarter players tend to play a default strategy which aims to exploit population tendencies ascertained heuristically through experience and for the more analytical folk, by querying via their tracking databases.

I guess it will be the same for these fast fold variants.

The future of a format is ultimately determined by how popular it is with fish.

They are the driver of the whole poker economy and strong players will readily learn new games to hunt them.

IMO fish want:

- fun (correlated with high action imo)

- the chance of winning big quick (big multiway pots)

- to play for stacks regularly

Effectively they want to gamble high action, high variance games!

Fast fold variants do speed up the pace of the game, but I suspect the player pool doesn't typically provide the action to keep fish engaged.

The equities in holdem run relatively quite far apart and often it is very obvious you are either ahead or behind if you have even a basic fundamental understanding of the game wrt raw hand strengths.

With the average player, playing a hand strength based strategy, holdem is relatively quite bad at generating action (if you've ever dabbled in PLO you will know what I mean).

Hyper HUSNGs have become very popular, largely because they do provide a lot of action. The fish love them.

And now a lot of strong players have rigged up their lines (skilled up their <= 25BB holdem game) and have been busy fishing in the hyper HUSNG pool.

I think hypers will remain popular because they are a high action game format.

But you only need to take a passing interest in poker forums to find that this format is at risk of being overfished.

The emergence of cartels will act to regulate the profitability and implicitly the sustainability of the format.

I've gone on a couple of tangents, but I think essentially the future of any game is dependent on how much fun fish have losing their money in it.

If you were erring between heads up cash and HUSNG, I think fish prefer HUSNG and so you should too.

They get more action for their buyin, the thrill of more all in confrontations more often as blinds go up and a false sense of accomplishment when they win tournaments fairly regularly (45-50%).