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I'm not a playa, I just grind a lot.

Having dinner in between sessions, so thought I'd do an update.

Been grinding hard for the last 3 weeks. 16 tabling 9man super turbos during the day as well as playing mid and the occasional high stakes HU super turbos at night. Results have been quite good.

Graph for 9man super turbo SNGs for the last 3 weeks

Graph for HU super turbo SNGs for the last 3 weeks

For those that don't know what super turbos are, I'll explain. They are like a regular tournament/sit n go, with one exception. Like the name suggests, the structure/speed of the tournament is VERY fast, you can even say it's SUPER FAST (attempt at joke = [x] fail). Anyways, I've been specializing at the 9man super turbo sit n gos (SNGs), for the last year and a bit. So how it works is, there are 9 players, you start with 300 starting chips, and the blinds start at 15/30 and go up every 3 minutes. The payout structure is the exact same as a standard SNG, where 1st gets 50% of the prizepool, 2nd gets 30%, and 3rd gets 20%. 

Unlike a regular sit n go, where you would normally start with a very deep stack in relation to the blinds, in super turbos, your starting stack is 10 times the big blind. Because of this, there isn't much room for play post-flop, so a preflop "Push-Fold" style of play seems most optimal for super turbos. "Push-Fold" basically means that you're either pushing all in or folding before the flop. No raising and seeing a flop, and definitely NO LIMPING in preflop to see a cheap flop. An exception to this is if u have a hand like KK or AA and you're in early position. Since the stacks are so shallow, there tends to be a raise/shove before the flop almost every hand, so limping in early position to allow someone else to shove for you is a tactic that some players use to get more action for their big hands, as opposed to the times that they shove with AA and everyone folds and they only pick up the blinds. Having said that...I NEVER do it. I just push all in or fold. When I'm playing 16 tables at once, I try and make life as easy as possible for myself, and by only pushing or folding preflop, decisions and multitabling becomes that much easier. This is where the term "Pushbot" comes from...Cuz all I do is PUSH PUSH PUSH no matter what. =)

The thing about super turbos is that they are very swingy, and there is a lot of variance. A lot of people try to get into super turbos, but cannot mentally deal with the swings/bad beats involved. Anytime you get your money in before the flop in a dominating position and lose is very frustrating, let alone this happening twice, three, four and even five times in a row. The thing about super turbos, is that because of their fast structure, the majority of the time, the stacks get in before the flop, as opposed to regular sit n gos and tournaments where there is a lot of play postflop, and the stacks get in on the flop, turn and river, where for good players, the edge/equity is generally a lot bigger. as a result of the majority of play happening preflop, there will seemingly be a lot more "bad beats".  For example, taking a coinflip AQ vs JJ, hitting an ace, and then the guy rivering his jack. Or getting the money in preflop with AA against 99, and the guy hitting a 9. Believe me, when I first started, it was REALLY FRUSTRATING. In the first week or two that I started playing these last March, I didn't even think it was poker, I thought it was the biggest crapshoot in the world. But as you can see by my graphs, there is a significant longterm edge that good players can both have and exploit in these.

Graph for 9man super turbo SNGs since March '09

Other than knowing proper hand ranges (Push-Fold & calling ranges), to me, super turbos come down to one thing...VOLUME, which I will talk about in my next post. 

Until next time...

- Gustav "NotTheRealGus" Hansen

O Hi There

Hey everyone. This is Gustav "NotTheRealGus" Hansen, with my first ever post in my new blog. This is something I've wanted to start for a while, and am very excited. I've always loved writing, and with this blog, I plan to combine two of my favorite things to do in life: Poker and writing. 

Although the majority of the blog will revolve around poker, I'm going to talk about many other things as well to keep readers interested (Friends, sports, partying with the boys, life in general, and pretty much anything I feel like blogging about that day).

I think this blog will not only give all of you an insight into the daily life of an online poker player, but it will also be very beneficial to me in that I am able to express thoughts/opinions on certain things on a daily basis. Again, I am very excited to be starting this, and hope that all you get as much enjoyment out of reading my blog as I will writing in it. 

Well, with all of that out of the way, I guess this first post should mostly be a brief introduction about myself, what I do, and a brief background about poker to give the non-poker community an insight on how the game became so big in mainstream media. So here we go.

My name is Mike Roque (Gustav Hansen on the interwebs), I'm 26 years old, and I play poker. I started playing  in 2001 when we were all still in high school. My friends and I always loved to gamble in many shapes and forms, so it seemed fitting that we would all eventually start playing cards. But in 2001, poker wasn't as big as it is right now. See, 2001 was "Pre-Moneymaker era," meaning that as a result of Chris Moneymaker not winning WSOP main event yet, the poker boom had not started. So, instead of playing the game that has taken over the world in the last 7 years, Texas Hold'em, we were playing other variations of poker such as 7 card stud, big 2, many forms of draw poker, and other games that we would just make up on the spot. I never knew that what had started as innocent gambling for quarters and sometimes cigarettes, would open the door to a world I never imagined I'd be a part of. 

See, back in the old days (and some people to this day are still stuck in this mentality), if you were to tell someone that you played poker for a living, they'd immediately think that you were just some degenerate gambler. This always seems to stem from a degenerate uncle, grandfather,  friend of a friend etc etc that gambled WAY above their head, and lost their life savings, or a significant chunk of it at least. So from that day on, to them, gambling = degenerate. 

But since Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP in 2003, texas hold'em has taken the world by storm. When people saw that some average joe from Tennessee turned a $39 satellite win into $2.5 million, people were instantly hooked. Thoughts of, "Well he did it, so can I!!!" were in the heads of millions and millions of people around the world that year who tuned in to ESPN to see him win. And that folks is how it all began.

Tournament fields went from hundreds of people, to numerous thousands in a year or two. People were flocking to their closest casino to learn to play the game that they've seen on tv and that their friends have been talking about for months. The majority of the people you saw in a poker room around this time of the decade were walking into a poker room for the first time, not having the faintest clue how to play the game, but moreso, what they were getting themselves into. People would be willing to lose hundreds and even thousands of dollars in a night to learn this magical game that had swept not only the nation, but the world. Everyone had seen the game on tv, and folks, they were HOOKED. 

Fast forward 7 years to the present. Look how far poker has come since 2003. It's completely and utterly mainstream. Almost everytime you're flipping through channels, you see a commercial for poker. When you go to work, the talk at the water cooler is some kind of poker talk; when the next home game will be, and if anyone saw that sick 5-bet shove by Durrrr on High Stakes Poker the night before. Even the WSOP has become completely mainstream. I remember watching coverage from the 2003 WSOP, the year Moneymaker won. First of all, since the field was so small, and it had been tradition for years, they held the WSOP at Binion's Horseshoe casino in downtown Las Vegas. Now, it's held at the Rio, a hotel/casino that can accommodate the >5000 players that play the WSOP main event every year. Not only this, but these days, there's advertising EVERYWHERE. The WSOP this year is sponsored by Jack Links Beef Jerky for fuck sakes! If you were to walk through the Amazon Room at the Rio during the WSOP, all you would see are promotional banners, ads for Jack Links Beef Jerky, and more than 50% of the people playing covered in patches from Pokerstars.net, FullTiltPoker.net, UB.net and other online gaming sites. Back in 2003, you barely saw any of this.

So now, when someone asks you what you do for a living, and you say poker, it's a lot less likely they look at you as some kind of degenerate gambler, and more likely that they're gonna berate you with questions like: 

How much you make? 

How they can get better at the game?

If you can teach them to play?

And the stereotypical, "If I give you $10, can you turn it into $100?"  (I hate being asked this because it's so cliche)

And that folks is a quick background into poker and the poker boom. Wow, I hadn't intended on it being that long, and really wanted to talk a little more about myself, what I play online etc etc..But as this 1st post is already vvvvvvv long, and in the interest of not boring first time readers, I shall cut it short, save it for the next post, and leave you wanting more. 

Till next time.

- Gustav "NotTheRealGus" Hansen