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:

Session 2 - 14/12/2019 Got some more games in today. A couple of nice runs in the Galaxy (4th for €112), the Gorsky (4th for €53) and the Black Hole (12th for €22 with €490 up top) resulted in a nice profit again, without a bink unfortunately this time. Always a bit salty to end up just short of the big money spots, but at least we're climbing steadily. Profit for the session: €70,19. Increased the bankroll to €562,28. :popeye:

Session 1 - 10/12/2019 The first session of the challenge felt a bit like a defeat, even though I ultimately ended up making a nice profit. I managed to bink a first tournament right off the bat with the €5 Falling Star Bounty for a little over a hundred euros. Besides this however, I had a couple of bigger spots already that went the wrong way unfortunately. Lost a big flip for the chiplead with 10 left in the €5 Deep Space, lost AA < QQ for a gigantic pot on the bubble in the €5 Sputnik, fired 6 bullets - lol - in the Black Hole only to end up close to the big payouts, and finally experienced the KK curse on the stone bubble of the late night €5 atom: So even after ending up with a profit, you can imagine I was hoping for more given the multitude of deep runs I had in this first session. Still, a profit in an MTT session is always great, and I'll take it over a loss to start this challenge with anytime! Detailed results of the session: Session 1b - 11/12/2019 Calling this session 1b as I didn't put in a full grind, but just registered a couple of games still late at night after watching the Champions League game of my favourite football team Club Brugge against Real Madrid (1-3 defeat, not too surprising ;)). Looked like a bad decision at first, bricking/punting literally everything without even getting close to the money in any game. Luckily all you need in MTTs is one good run, which came along in the late €10 Shooting Star Bounty. Sunrunned this from start to finish, scoring 9 knockouts in the 37 player field and finishing up with a €117,44 score! Fun remark in this one: the player who was joint chip leader together with me on the bubble with 8 left, apparently decided it was late enough already to go to bed and see the next day where he ended up at. I ran so disgustingly well that I managed to knock out everybody on the FT before this guy blinded out of the tournament. I'd say he still owes me a percentage of his second place money for that favour as well ;) Detailed results: After 22 MTTs: Buyins = €195 Cashes = €287,09 ROI = 47,23% / Profit = €92,09 Could not ask for much more really to start this road with. Bankroll already up to €492,02 :Smirk: I'll play the next session this Saturday or Sunday, let's hope I can keep this positive trend going!

Thanks for the kind words @Psycho79 , @LeVsKaRa , @GR1ZZL3R! :) You're probably right there GR1ZZL3R, I guess most of them consider it a waste of time :Laugh: Previous blog of mine indeed stopped dead partly because of this too, partly because of there not being a real 'goal' of the thread. Maybe that's not necessary per se, but just posting about a tournament bink every now and then seemed a bit cocky and not too interesting. This thread will have a clear goal and should not die before that goal is attained. Whenever I get there I may still go on updating about whatever I'm busy with, depending on how much I still like to do that ;)

Hey all :) It's been a good while since I made a thread here in the community, but here I am again. For those who don't know anything about me, I made a thread a couple of years ago describing rather comprehensively how I got into poker and got to the point where I was at that time (First post in this thread for anyone interested: https://www.unibetcommunity.com/t5/Blogs-Stories/Story-Review-of-a-poker-journey/m-p/127681#M3541). In short, I started out with poker by grinding the 5-man Sit&Go's here at Unibet. Did that for a couple of years, climbing through the ranks until I became a regular at the highest stakes Unibet has to offer in this format. This meant grinding the €10/25 games mostly and hopping in the €50/100 games whenever they happened to run. Almost exactly one year ago however, I decided to make the switch to playing mostly MTTs. Glad I did that, as even though MTTs come with bigger variance swings, they also turned out to be way more profitable for me in the end. It also was a nice change of flow, as going deep in a big tournament gives quite the adrenaline rush compared to playing thousands of the same 5-man SNG games, where the most exciting thing that ever happens is flipping headsup for a 3 buyin victory :Laugh: Besides MTTs, I also started playing some more cash games this year if I busted all tournaments early or whenever the schedule didn't offer many games I'm interested playing in. Additionally, I played my first Unibet Open ever in Paris a couple of weeks ago! Everything combined, this year has been by far my best year in poker resultswise, something I'm obviously very happy with :) I never really kept track in the last year though of how well exactly I have been doing in each gametype, something I did do for the SNG games I played before. So that's why the idea came to my mind to start some personal MTT Bankroll challenge, keeping track of the games I play for it, how well I'm doing in them, and reporting it in a blog here on the community to make sure I don't get lazy with keeping track of all the numbers ;) The reason to start this is twofold. On the one hand, it will be interesting for myself to have some data on how well I do in which MTTs. And even if the sample size may not be all that significant to draw any conclusions from this, I'll at least still enjoy myself making some nice graphs and excel files to post here :Geek: On the other hand, it would also be great to (hopefully :D) show that it's very much possible to grind out a healthy bankroll in the Unibet MTT streets, starting from the lower stakes. As I don't want to be grinding micro/low stakes games for half an eternity, I will go for a very agressive BR management scheme: As a disclaimer, I would not advise anyone who cannot afford to lose his roll to use this scheme. I luckily have the luxury that I can just deposit a new bankroll on to the site if I would happen to bust it. If busting your roll would mean the end of playing poker for you, as a rule you should have at least 100 buyins for freezeouts in your bankroll as a strict minimum, probably even more. Something each and everybody should figure out for themselves. The agressive rules should allow me to ascend quicker through the stakes, reaching my main games (€25+ MTTs) a bit faster. As much as I would like to start at the €1 MTT level and show everyone it can be done by starting from rock bottom, I also want to think a bit about how useful I am spending my time and will thus start with a bankroll that allows me to play everything at the €5 level. In other words, 80 buyins for €5 R/A MTTs will see me start with a bankroll of €400, immediately also allowing me to add some €10 bounties and freezeouts but no €10 R/As. This will help with filling table space too, as when you only get to play fivers, I noticed you can easily run out of games to play when you experience some quick bustouts along the way :Laugh: As the highest MTT Unibet currently offers is the €200 Big Bang, I would need to attain an €8k roll to be able to play this one according to the BR rules. As €10k looks a bit nicer, that will be the profit cap for this challenge. In other words, the challenge is to grind a €400 bankroll up to €10.000, following the above bankroll rules. With the risk of exposing myself and looking pretty silly when I never get past the €5 level :Rofl: But hey, if so, so be it. Not sure yet how often I will play sessions for this challenge. For now I would aim at at least once or twice a week, as I will still play some sessions outside of the challenge for myself when I feel like it. I also have exams coming up in January and a Master's dissertation to write between February and June, so grinding every evening will not be an option anyway for the months to come. Read: this challenge may take a while. But we're not in a hurry anyway, are we? ;) As a last remark: I will be playing all games in the €5/10 mtts for the challenge with my community alias - you may already have spotted me at the tables yesterday playing the first session towards this challenge (will post the results shortly after this post). Once I get higher I'll probably start changing my alias a bit more, as the pools are a bit smaller and a couple of regs will definitely be smart enough to gain some edges here and there by knowing who I am if I play with the same alias all the time. But for now, feel free to come and join my tables with your community alias as well whenever you see me in one of your favourite mtts :) Thanks a lot to anyone who will be interested in reading and following this blog. Wish me luck! Caladrias

Leo, maybe an extra €10r/a sat solely on Tuesdays would also make sense? One that starts a bit earlier (18CET?) so the winner(s) can jump in from the start of the event as well :) I know there's already an extra ticket in the sat now on Tuesdays and it did well previously, so I imagine a lot of people would play an earlier sat as well. Worth the try? 😉

@jerry That’s just a bug in the lobby :) When the freeroll starts, you’ll be playing with the alias you have selected as active at that moment.

@Leo-Unibet A lot of players really enjoyed playing the €50 UOS bounty tonight! It would be nice to have a daily €50 bounty on the regular MTT schedule, I think the crowd would be there to play it. Maybe an idea to test after the series? :)

Just found it and no worries, looks perfect! Many thanks

Hi guys, could I get my all time poker results please? I.e. From whenever I started playing up until now :) If this is possible, with the following filters: - one global sheet (all formats, all time) - one for cash games - one for MTTs - one for 5-max sngs - one for 2-max sngs Thanks a lot!

No comet during UOS @Leo-Unibet ? Any other mtts that won't be there for the coming two weeks? Don't you think it would be good for the new people playing the high UOS events to see there's a daily €50 on the site? :)