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Hey guys, not really looking for specific hand advice right now, although will likely put some up soon.

Just looking for anyone playing husng regularly. I used to play hypers on stars a few years back and done okay at 7s after a few thousand games.

Kind of fell out of love with poker mainly due to changes in circumstances and all of stars changes.

Got the itch back again  which seems to constantly happen... played a few on stars again and people seem pretty terrible still at the lower levels at least. Also played a few on unibet where I would rather play but they're more like turbos rather than hyper with 1k start stack and 3 min levels.

Don't really know anybody in poker so trying to connect with others playing these games regularly who can talk few a few hands etc here and there.

Camel posting under another username!  Oh the glory days of heads up STT's!

Can confirm this is not Camel :). Does anyone play these now? Stars seems to be only Russians and Ukrainians playing. I played some on sky poker which was soft but not great volume to be had.

Haven't played a HUSNG for over 5 years.

Stars allowing these syndicates to own the lobbies killed the game.

Casual players had zero shot of playing anyone who wasn't a pro.

Just played 4.

Hated every second.

Heaven only knows how I used to played 8 hour sessions a decade ago.

Yeah the cartels are a joke. Low stakes right now people a still terrible, but I guess it seems pretty counter intuitive to spend a load of time getting better at them to just battle all the good guys...

Casuals have always had close to zero chance of playjng anyone but a pro / reg.

Cartels increase reg v reg battles and forced bumhunters to either move down or quit.

It's not perfect but way better than the bumhunting that preceded it.

People who used to sit waiting for fish at the 200s were forced down to the 15s within months of divisions making red battles mandatory for regs.

If HU cash had a similar system it wouldn't be a  dead format.

The only losers are mediocre regs, bumhunter and semipros who can't put in the hours to maintain their spot. Everyone else is either neutral or benefits

How does that work?  Surely if you get rid of mediocre regs and bumhunters and replace them with better regs then the casual player must have a lower EV?

So the only people who win are people in syndicates?  Suspect you get a handful of big winners who run the best stables who end up with most of the money. 




 

The best players end up with more money, yes. That's better than a system where mediocre bumhibters who couldn't beat 30 dollar regs where creaming money off at 200 dollar + levels


Simply put the best regs moved from a system where they wouldn't sit anyone who wasn't a fish to sitting everyone who couldnt make them pay rake.

At first only a few regs would clear the lobbies but others where riding in behind and not pulling their weight. The divisions formalised this. Everyone has to sit anyone who isn't in.

There are clear ev requirements to join a divisions except the 1ks where things are incredibly shady. I'll post on that when I'm home as it's really interesting.

I'm someone who loses in the cartel system. I can't put in the volume requirednto join a division even though I'd very likely have the ev v them to do so.

It really harms bumhubters though. Plenty of people who are destroyed by regs have no trouble wracking up huge winrates v recs. They play a hyper exploitative style which is, in turn, easily exploited. Turns out many where literally playing a level above their station when the better regs decided to start sitting them.

Two systems :

1 regs collude by never sitting each other

2 regs sit each other and only those good enough to beat a level stay there.

Hey Teddy, so seems you are a fan of the cartels then? Or Kinda? Seen as there is no real other option.

I know you said you can't play much, but are you playing these games somewhat often? How do you see them panning out over the next 12-24 months? I realise that is probably a tough question to answer.

Thing is I have been bobbing around a lot of different forms of poker and really want to stick with one and knuckle down. I have always liked mtts but can't really put in the hours, so these are good in that regard.

Also would be interested to hear more about the 1k games you were talking about.

yes, i think it was a very clever solution to a particular problem, and although it would have prevent me eg bumhunting higher levels i liked the competitiveness and transparency. it was the natural equilibrium of the enviroment. it had some fringe benefits also. when players tried to organise strikes to reverse the rake increases when amaya frist took over stars it was an almost complete failure. for every cash reg that refused to login there were more that exploited this by moving up or playing longer hours in softer games. except that didnt happen in husng's because the divisions where organised.

they had a 99% sit out rate. a few regs tried to exploit the situation but when they were spotted the were sat relentlessly by people who normally play much higher - some lost their spots because of it.  also the divisons took all their reg battles off stars to other sites - you have to play 1-2k games minimum v division members to get in and they simply shifted all that valuable low edge warring to another site. when the dust settled amaya changed very little. but they did reverse all the rake increases imposed on husng's.

as for taking up husngs i wouldnt recommend it. they are hella fun to play so there's that. and they are poker's best dojo so i'd always recommend them to new or improving players. but for a long term, stake climbing, professional investment? no.

upto $15s there are no divisions on stars. at $30s and above you will be sat by every reg unless you can battle your way in. at $60s the volume has dropped off a cliff. also most of the soft spots have already been attacked or moved to spins, and the players left there are well used to reg warring and are highly skilled players. the $100s+ are incredibly tough.

the format is also pretty much solved. so if you play on a site other than stars, at decent stakes you will likely be playing a bot or someone with access to the solutions using them real time.

so as a format to knuckle down into i'd use it as an intense learning tool, and then look to specialise in another format.

the 1ks are law unto themselves and there's interesting history there. i'll delve into it a bit with a tl;dr warning.

a bit of background:

in husng's recs like to join games, but dont like to start games. stars has two available lobbies at each stake. so being able to sit first is worth a lot. also husng hypers are incredibly profitable and very low variance. all the big winners hide the sharkscope as their graphs were showing huge profits with no variance - dan coleman spoke about having a $2m year with zero variance that 1k/2/k plo players would have had wet dreams about. the high stakes lobbies were always protected in the sense that a small group of players would be very protective of the two lobbies and any new players would be sat relentlessly as the spots were worth hundred of thousands of dollars per year. [one of the first players to do this was skaiwalkurr. there is an old training video where a $300 reg / coach says on video that skaiwalkurr was no longer allowing regs to grab the spare seat @ the highest stake and was sitting all but maybe 3-4 players who tried to share the lobby with him.]

at lower stakes with bigger player pools it was hard to grab a lobby manually with lots of simul-sits occuring where regs would accidently sit each other in the rush to grab a valuable open-sit. so stars husng lobbies below $1ks became effectively controlled by a program called sharkystrator. this program places all users in a list and regs you one-by-one into one of the two lobbies available at each stake. you can colour code players so if a rec tag or unkown player manages to snag a lobby you can jump the queue by being willing to play that tag. this meant that regs could all sit in the sharky list safely avoiding each other and only playing people outside of the program. since any reg with any clue about poker would have the program it meant near 100% rec action.

but this meant queues got huge as people moved up and hid from the regs. 60-100 players all waiting to play recs.

the better regs had enough of wating. and a few started to clear the queue by sitting all the bad and mediocre regs. this allowed some better regs to freeroll off the hard work by profitting from smaller queues without having to battle the weaker regs.

so the process was formalised: all member have to set sharky to sit non-members.

to become a member you have to battle the division and achieve a certian ev roi

here is the 30's division list with rules expected of members and people trying to get in:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FCxkfTYpWQguIoDSyugjEwQBncq_5b9_8ewdvbV2y9s/edit#gid=0

a player can get in touch with a division member and ask for games, the division member cannot decline the action.

its terrible for bad regs. and a lot of people got found out. being amongst the worst players in a division is awful. all people moving up stakes want to battle you and you cannot decline action. when someone gets in the division kicks someone out. that someone is likely going to be the poor sap who was being targeted by all these motivated skilled triers.

but the divisions do have clear entry and exit points and everything is open.

ish

until you get to the 1ks where things get a bit more murky...

Fascinating.

the 1k hyper lobbies were and still are a money printing operation. mtt regs, cash regs, sunday million winners, rich whales all liked to enter the sharks den and blow off steam. being able to hold a 1k lobby was such a sick spot.

here is dan colmans infamous 2013 graph:

(https://i.imgur.com/itosfWX.png)

notice this doesnt include a few 100k in crossbooks v an mtt grinder nor does it include SNE rakeback which was 45-55%?

one of skaiwalkurrr's graphs:

(https://i.imgur.com/NRCXlWw.jpg)

again no rakeback included - and this includes his pre husng days.

most winners simply hid their graphs so as not to attract HU cash regs in particular. and they became increasingly protective of their lobbies.

established regs left other established regs alone, but anyone wanting to move up from the 500s ran into some serious barriers to entry. dan coleman was probably the biggest of those barriers at the time. he actively sought out reg wars, preferring to 6 table regs and have some fish action on the side. he seemed to revel in being the end boss of the games. here's a quote of his:

colman: "I have good news and bad news. The good: Before becoming a 1k reg, you will have won 200k off me. The bad: Most likely not going to happen."

but the spot was worth so much people where willing to battle. when it went wrong it often went very wrong, here is a british $500 reg sifting through the aftermath of a failed $1k shot where he cam eup against colman and left $150k worse off:

https://www.husng.com/content/interview-richard-chadders0-chadwick-i-stopped-my-1k-shots

also remember skaiwalkurrr whose graph i posted earlier, he quit in 2015 here is his lifetime husng graph:

(https://i.imgur.com/QsjqK98.png?1)

2.3m in profit. lovely stuff. but see that tail-off at the end? its the characteristic tail-off of rake. he ended with 8 months of break even play, losing to rake for 8 solid months. what caused it? a hostile take over bid by a rival group. the bali-cartel.

lats part to follow

This is excellent stuff, tended to avoid here for a while but thoroughly enjoying this thread!

Great info teddy thank you. Agree that they are a great training ground for a lot of other forms of poker. Remember chadders and skaiwalker playing a bit back in the day.

What a boss colman is lol

Now you have explained it better it does seem the cartels forming were the only choice I guess and seems I will be leaving well alone...

Probably still play them at lower stakes, 7s and 15s for fun and to help improve

Thanks again man

... cont

the 1k spots were worth a lot of money: hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. people up there were very protective of the lobbies - simple ev rules didnt apply. the interview i posted with chadders0 contains a quote that perfectly illustrates how valuable the spots are, and also how brutally difficult they are to attain:

chadders0: I had set aside 2 years worth of expenses in the event of a worst case scenario

so to even consider taking a shot you have to commit:

2 years living expenses from your bankroll

the roll to play 1ks v the very best

to be willing to war for months on end with the very best

to be willing to accept that you might lose 150k of that roll in taking your shot

now thats a tall order. remember colman, skaiwalkurrr et al can simply print money by still taking lobbies behind and grinding 1k whales. people shot taking effectively have no income. it's not just that you come up against skill: its a war off attrition where the biggest bankroll survives. colman and his fellow 1k regs had printed millions pre rake back and could simply swarm anyone trying to force thier arm. here's another UK shot taker, 1rake1[we'll meet him again later] on how difficult the process was:

You would be made to build up samples with each cartel member, when it suited the cartel member not yourself. If the cartel member was playing another shot taker you would have to wait your turn. If the cartel member was playing another shot taker and sitting lobbies behind to earn some extra money from fish (just to ensure this reg battling wasn't affecting his income too much) you would have to let him do this. If not this was called 'teaming' and that is NOT ALLOWED.

To survive your shot take you have to on average be beating everyone in the cartel for rake (after rakeback). If you managed to keep this rate up this means you will earn exactly zero money every day you're working. Whilst you're trying to build your samples with everyone putting in as much volume as you can every day, this volume is spread thin across everyone currently in the cartel and the daily / monthly income of each individual member in the cartel is minimally affected. There is no volume goal, or results based goal to gain your entry into the cartel. You just have to wait for them to collectively act fairly and decide to accept you as a member, which could be never.

something was going to have to give. in 2014 something did give:









(https://i.imgur.com/jEAFAqc.jpg?1)

dan colman wins the one drop and scoops $15m and then goes on one of the sickest heaters the high stake live scene has ever witnessed. and he does so largely on his own dime. sick life.

one of the biggest bankrolls in husng's gets disproportionately bigger... and quits.

he isn't the only one. two other 1k members, jossel and killuifiplay, also quit around the same time. 3 of the biggest bankrolls and significant barriers to the 1k lobbies decide to leave the format. and a bloodbath ensues. people from the 300's division and up try to take their spots, only the game is still rigged against them. the empty spots are worth as much empty to the people still up there as they are to the people trying to fill them. chadders0 estimated colman letting him in would cost colman 150k a year - no wonder he was so motivated to keep him out. and the system in place was rigged against people moving up. a different approach was needed.

piosolver became widely available around this time. and HUSNG solutions were being refined. as a study tool pio was and is the nuts. it allowed motivated players to study spots, become drilled in optimal play and so be able to exploit deviations from that play. a group of highly motived young grinders relocated to a grind / study house together.  a collection of $200-$500 regs reclocated to bali and set about trying to take the 1k lobbies by force.  heres 1rake1 again:

We looked at the previous shot takes of chadders at 1k and valuelol at 500s, and considered the amount of time and money that would need to be invested on the hope that we would get a fair treatment from a handful of individuals. At the same time spiritedreal had just played over 20k games at 300s and we saw first hand what the ‘power in numbers’ can do. It seemed too easy to keep triers out. Even if we beat the cartel by a good amount, the huge amount of money they could recoup off fish might still make it their most profitable move to keep us out indefinitely and not let us have a piece of their pie. Also in my opinion it scares people when 2/3/4 people who grind together try and move up. This alone would have made it a lot tougher than previous triers to get accepted. So for these reasons, we decided to go for a different approach, thought we were most likely to get accepted by stopping people fishing behind when they played us, and when we were all online, we could get lobbies ourselves.

We were also less sure of our ability at the start of the year and thought the extra lobbies behind could be good to offset the potentially very long and potentially very expensive shot take.

Due to a combination of the cartels putting in less volume, and some people avoiding us we actually ending up with the lobbies uncontested a lot of the time. At this stage, we got a bit ahead of ourselves and decided we could probably just lock down a set time period, deter other regs from playing that slot, and we would effectively be our own group. However, things didn’t quite go as expected

these guys had all progressed through the divisions. they were well versed in reg battling and through the study methods of programs like piosolver had an incredibly solid reg game down pat. some of the 1k regs had relied on numbers, bankrolls and people like colman. they might not be mental ready,  and the bali group decided that the time was right to strike.

they would battle the 1k regs but not allow them to take lobbies uncontested behind. they would take the lobbies themselves en masse. they werent going to play by the established cartels rules. but the cartel were going to up their game, also. here's another member of the rival bali-group, adam1988:

it was myself, the 1rake1, mavrickkk, majcy and Campbell-gee all living together in Bali. We had an incline that the 1k regs were going to be behind the times in reg battling as they hadn’t been tested for so long. But the system was rigged against anyone shooting, even if you crushed them in a reg battle they would make so much off the fish they wouldn’t have to let you in. So we decided to all shoot and take the lobbies behind. Our incline was right and most of the 1k regs were not even willing to battle, but what we didn’t predict was that they would add every $500 reg who would play us to $1ks so that they could regain the lobbies.

thats right the established 1k members simply promoted any 500 reg who was willing to grind the bali-group. at the time they also stated that would allow other people in but  the brothers mavvrick and 1rake1 would not be allowed in. politics pure and simple.

lets go back to skaiwalurrrs graph

(https://i.imgur.com/QsjqK98.png?1)

that tail off represents that 8 month battle where the bali group swarm the 1k lobbies and take them by force. he quits the game at this point, 8 months of intense politics, reg warring and a 100k downswing ends it for actually one of the nice guys of poker. here is a chat log of when a recreational accidently sits his $2k lobby and you can sense his sense of panic straight out.


gg skai. not all the bali group make it. cambell-gee lost a chunck of his role and a bunch of motivation, majcy was purposely not allowed in with some 1k regs feeling he was acting above his station trying to get in with the group. but a lot do make it in, and not just from the bali group

the guys that did get in post many $15 - 25k + weeks, and reap the rewards

some have since quit the game for good. others banned for using artificial assistance [none of the bali boys fwiw]

but politics, money and power.

who said poker was dull

Didn't realise Camel was the head honcho of the heads up STT cartels a decade ago!  You kept all this quiet Keith! 

Amazing read thanks for posting.

Cheers teddy, even knowing a lot more than most about this type of situation it was an enjoyable read.

Just caught up with this, great read Teddy, really interesting stuff.

I think it's a disgrace that Stars allows these cartels to operate.

It is collusion and means it is impossible for a rec to get a game against another rec.

Such an easy fix, have blind lobbies just like the spin n goes.

Recs never had a chance to get another rec.

The old system saw regs only ever playing recs

Stars won't return to the old system as regs playing regs is good for stars. Regs have to churn deposits to rake in low edge battling. They won't give that up easily

Whn I started there were regularly empty lobbies.

Well that's a different thing. With low reg / rec ratios of course  rec/rec games were more common. I'd still wager that there were still people looking to snap sit an unknown name, even if that meant jumping up stakes. but once people cottoned onto how much edge and low variance money could be printed that ratio was never going to last.

The conditions that led to regs wanting to battle other regs for thousands of games wasnt one with empty lobbies and recs happily grinding other recs. The ratios were out of whack long before that.

The divisions simply formailise the concept of: if you don't want to get sat, don't open sit. Regs simply stopped avoiding people who couldn't make them pay rake

With clear entry and exit points I've no problem with the lower divisions. Its a very clever solution to the ecology of games. Stars have stated that as long as the recs experience is unaffected and games fire off they have no interest in anything else.  the needs of players who want to only play recs or who open sit and then complain when they are sat are low down on their list of priorities it seems.

I speak as someone who lost out in the formation of the divisions at mid stakes as I could not put in the volume to maintain a spot.