Caladrias

As a player who built his initial bankroll specifically in these games, I would be very sad to see them go. As you know, I still am a big fan of the format even to this day, although I haven't had as much time to play poker over the last year as I used to have before. Pretty surprised though to see this topic title, I've fired up quite some 5-mans over the last two months and traffic seemed better than it used to be at some points in time. I see the €25s run decently well some evenings whereas they used to be close to dead for a while, and the €10s have traffic every evening. I would know because I'm in there again 🙂. Granted, probably a lot of the same players in all of them, these games always have depended a lot on regs in order to start. With regard to the proposed changes, the 5 minute break every hour is probably the one that's highly needed. Not having this currently prevents many MTT players from firing up some of these on the side I'm pretty sure. When I decide to play an mtt session, I also like to fill up with sngs later in the evening when I start busting tables. I'll often only do so in the first half of the hour though, as I know I prevent myself from ever having a break otherwise. I'd imagine quite some other players feel the same, of which many won't even bother to fire up any at all due to this. I don't see the other two proposals make any impact on the traffic in the games honestly, but also am not opposed to these. Antes from the start would definitely feel better, more in line with the current age of poker. 50bb or 66b starting stack doesn't matter much. The money in these games is won on the bubble when average stack is 10bb. The action early on is just about some coolers between regs on the one hand and about recs punting it off where they shouldn't on the other hand, until bubble play starts. Finally, I'd like to plea for these games to keep existing. As said, these allowed me to move up in stakes when I discovered poker. They are very learnable (both theoretically and intuitively), low variance compared to mtts/spins and only take about 30 minutes. A rare and valuable combination in poker games these days I would say. It's why I still love to only play this format when there's a period where I don't have a huge amount to play poker. They allow for a small two hour session to be played and still end up with a nice little profit the majority of the time, for people who aren't a fan of cash games. I honestly often think of these vanilla sngs as the equivalent of cash games for people who like to have some ICM fun 😅. And even though they are very learnable, I still see regulars who play these games every single day make incredible mistakes during bubble play. This is exactly what leaves the door open for players to put some effort into learning even just a little bit about these games and quickly become a winning player in them to build up a small starting bankroll. It's very damn hard to do this in mtts or spins as a beginning player, without being put off by the long losing streaks that are inherent to these formats. Hope to never see these games disappear, and I'll try to fire up some extra whenever I can to help their cause, having seen this topic about the current doubts around them 😉. Looking forward to see what changes you'll decide on.

You were playing me, forgot to change my alias mid session! Quite the headsup indeed, but more than happy to take second prize too 😄 Congrats!

Put me in, coach!

I think the new schedule is a big improvement. I, like many of the regulars, was a big exploiter of the R/A tournaments by max late registering them all and stalling towards the add-on to then start playing the tournament. It was just the right thing to do regarding profitability as soon as you understood the ICM mechanics of R/A mtts. Doesn't take much to understand that the more recreational players were the big victims of this, and it's just way better for a poker economy long-term as the schedule is now. I have to say I enjoy playing the schedule a lot more now too than I used to. I play way more tournaments from the start now, as there's not too much of a point anymore to set alarms to max late register 70% of the games. I now prefer to realise my edge for a longer period of time by registering early. I'm just checking every break what to register and then I'm good to go for another hour, not checking the lobby much anymore in between, sessions are a lot more relaxed. In the end the bigger GTDs now should also benefit everyone, and make up big time for the 'loss' of the profitability of the R/A tournaments. Pretty sure that the route of the new schedule is the better one to take compared to the former one. I like to look at my glass being half full instead of half empty anyways, too. 😄 Enjoyed the first month of playing the new schedule and I'm sure I'll continue to do so, big kudos to all who worked towards designing and implementing it!

You'll never lose your ability to complain just about everything and anything, huh? 🤭

Good luck buddy. You’ll still run into me every now and then, although the bulk of my volume on Unibet has now shifted to mtts. Still adding some sngs as fillers sometimes or when I feel like playing a shorter session. Only the €10+ games though, see you there!

Definitely the level progression :) If one wants to designate the duration of a tournament, terms like short/long are more appropriate. The terms you mentioned above 100% relate to the tempo of the blind progression to me. In that sense it's very weird to me as well that when filtering for 'slow' in the current client, you can find tournaments with blind progressions ranging from 20 minute levels to 6 minute levels. The latter is by no means 'slow'. Looks like these tags are just there based on the duration of the tournament. This is 1) pretty counterintuitive, as mentioned above. 2) redundant, as there already is a separate column for the time duration of a tournament. Meaning the T and S symbols have no extra merit at all this way. I never look at them because of this. Would be nice if 'Turbo' could mean 4-6m levels, 'Hyper' <4m levels, 'Slow' 12m+ levels, and 'Regular' speed everything in between. Would be more intuitive ánd more useful to anyone I think :)

Can't agree more with the proposal of adding the €50 5-mans again :) I'm not as big as a sng grinder anymore as I once was a few years ago, having moved over to mtts mainly after the sngs died around the time hexapro got introduced. But since the promo in November, I play them again at a regular basis, played a few hundred of them again already in 2021. The traffic in the €25s hasn't been as good as it is now for a loooong time, I can get 6 tables running without issues basically every evening when I want to. Seems like the promo did manage to draw some more players to the sngs again, and maybe some of these extra €25 players would also jump in the €50s. I know I would ;)

The €25 bounty mtts are great value for sure, definitely the softest €25 mtts in the schedule I would say! Regarding amount of tables, I've 4-tabled the 5-man sngs for years back when I started out, as I was also playing on my small laptop screen back then. Now I usually 6-table them. Any more than that and I feel like I start missing spots or can't adjust to table dynamics as well anymore as I would like to. I've never really understood how some regs used to 12-14 table these, for instance like during the promo month. Must be so draining for the brain and super hectic at times. 6 tables can already get quite hectic sometimes, as it for instance already happens quite frequently that you're playing three headsups and three bubbles concurrently. I can't even imagine double the chaos :laugh: For mtts I can handle some more tables, prefer having 6 tables there as well as the sweet spot but during UOS for instance I'm often 8-10 tabling when the FOMO on some value hits ;)

Just stumbled upon your blog here, nice results over the last months, pretty impressive! I just restarted playing after a little time off. We battled quite a bit in the €25 sngs today, I played as DigitalLove for most of the time. I ran superhot for sure, sorry about that :D GL GL in the coming weeks, I'll be grinding the PKO series coming up next week and will probably keep playing some sngs on the side as well. See you at the tables!

I'm hopping into the mix again as well, first full sng grind in 2 years time for me yesterday. So you definitely played me a bunch as well :D What do you think, any chance the 50s and 100s could see a revival that goes on after the promo as well, with the lowered rake to 2%?

Yeah, pretty sure the main issue with this tournament is it being KO instead of PKO. I would be more interested to play it in the latter case, and I'm pretty sure the majority of the Unibet players has the same preference. afaik it's the only KO tournament on the site. Seems not to work very well, but that doesn't mean a €50 PKO couldn't work. Different format :)

@KrustyTheClown Writing my Master's Dissertation is unfortunately taking up a whole lot of my time right now. I'm not spending too much time online these days :)

Just spent a week sick in bed, hence the follwing updates have been delayed. Making this a swift update though :) 17/12/2019 - 19/12/2019 Played a couple of late night €5-€10 mtts first with good results, setting me up for another shot at the €25 bounty games. Fired these up the day after, making nice runs in both, but not keeping the goodrun up until the very end: 5th place in both after getting it in good twice really did hurt, I have to say. Sigh. The two FTs did give me a profitable session of aroud €150, but holding these dominating spots would of course have been big equity swings for much more. Anyway, that's poker. Next session had another very promising run in the Deep Impact this time. Reached the FT and ended... 5th :Rofl: Just lost a flip with AK this time though, not that much to moan about. At least this accounted for the biggest score in the challenge so far! Bankroll up to €1170,55. 21/12/2019 - 26/12/2019 After these good results followed a terrible stretch: 15 games with only a singel mincash and 1 bounty scored. Bankroll plummeting. Until finally on Boxing day, the €10 sputnik came to the rescue with a nice win for me. More than that there wasn't to report about this stretch of games I fear :Wink: Challenge will go on hold for a while now. Celebrating Old and New soon, and first exam at University coming up on the 6th of January. Whenever we go on again, we start with a nice BR of €1116,34. Very glad I managed to nearly triple the initial €400 already in just over a hundred games. Some more stats about these first games: Buyins: €1287,00 Cashes: €2003,34 ROI: 55,66% Peak BR: €1211,94 Biggest cash: €289,44 Then there's only one thing left to say for me now: happy holidays and have a wonderful start in the new decade everyone!

Session 3 - 15/12/2019 I had one Supernova ticket left that was about to expire, so played that one on Sunday (outside of the challenge) together with some more €5s and €10s for this challenge. Happy I did, as I made a really deep run in a Sunday major: The Spectrum. Unfortunately couldn't run well until the very end, but the consolation prize was nice as well: Biggest score so far! Bankroll skyrocketing to €816,90! Session 4 - 16/12/2019 As the €800 mark had been breached for the first time, it was time to take some shots in the next stakes. Decided to play 3 bigger tournaments: the €10R/A sputnik, and both €25 bounties on the daily schedule (Dwarf Star Bounty and the late Shooting Star Bounty). End of the good news show for now though. Of these higher MTTs only the Dwarf Star resulted in a deep run, but I ended up stone bubbling it by running into a cooler being 6/12. Flopped top and bottom pair after a big blind defend and got in my 25 big blinds against a flopped straight, so that was that. First losing session of the challenge became a reality: - €74,65 for the session and BR down to €742,25. Next session will be back in the €5 and €10 streets, grinding towards that second higher stakes shot. :Popeye: As the number of mtts is starting to go somewhere, I'll start including a nice graph of the results from next post on :Wink: