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pokerzoe's picture
is it worthwhile playing Hypers at all?

I've been playing poker online since 2002, many cash games and MTTs. Had a break for the last two years and have recently started playing the Hypers (I used to play HU limit cash at stakes up to 30/60). I don't have the finances to play those stakes anymore but started small on Stars beating the $7s for around 3% ROI over a sample of 10,000 games. I have been playing on FT since it reopened and have been getting slaughtered over the last 3500 games. I've now dropped down to the $2.25 (Im bankrolled for higher but won't play higher until I feel I am out of this bad run). Last two sessions have been the same as all the others, dropping 30BI and 20BI. I don't tilt (much) maybe spunked off 3 or 4 BI at most, the rest are just horrible beats, every time I get it it I lose no matter what.

Anyway, I've studied some of the graphs of the top HUSNG players on Sharkscope and have noticed that 2000 game downers/breakeven happens to everyone. But what is more worrying to me is that some of them have had 10,000 game downswings. That is a lot of games! I guess it would take me around 3 months to play 10,000 games and just cannot see the point if you play well and cannot win for such a period. I suppose at the high levels you make rakeback to make it worth your while, but at low stakes I just cannot see that even playing these could be +EV.

The Variance calculator on this site does not work for me but I'd like to get comments from folks on here regarding their downswings (longest, how to cope etc) and in particular from anyone who has been playing on FT.

RyPac13's picture
I think a lot of the longer

I think a lot of the longer stretches are a result of poor play as often as they are running bad.
Do you have any EV graphs (PokerTracker 4 for example)? It can help to see what your EV is, since it's a much better indicator of your true skill than your results.
The usual advise is to focus on improving while you're struggling, double down on studying and working hard to improve your game. Hypers are super profitable, a few leaks fixed and you can go from a low edge player that has tons of downswings and breakeven stretches to a medium to high (relative) to edge player that might still have bad stretches, but it'll be like one of those huge winner's graphs, make a ton in 20k games, then have a rough 3-5k game stretch. Not that big of a deal if you can keep your results in perspective as a big winner.

pokerzoe's picture
Hey man, thanks for the

Hey man, thanks for the reply. I missed out on a ton of hand histories when I started so I'll not bother with a graph of a small sample . I might ask FT to send me the histories so I can see exactly what has been going on. Things have picked up in the last session though and I've watched most of the free videos on this site, some of which are great! I'll keep plugging away :)