New Year... New Game...

As the title suggests, I'm not playing my usual mtt sngs so far this year. I've played a few of them during the first few days of Jan but didn't really make much from them. In fact i think im a little down in those games this year. I did however somehow fall upon a new game... Heads Up.
Its never before appealed to me much as i've never liked the idea of playing to win such small amounts. I'd always imagined the possible roi would be tiny, variance big and that i'd be rubbish at it.
I think this opinion has come from my experience of HU which is usually at the end of a sng with big blinds where its pretty much shove every button, fold every BB until eventually someone gets bored, calls and then sucks out on the other person. Not really that fun... (slight exaggeration i know but you get the idea!)

Having played a few HU turbo sngs over the past few days, I've quickly learned this isn't the case. There's actually scope to get a fairly consistent win rate going and make a fairly healthy and consistent income from them while keeping the flexibility in my schedule that i seem to crave so much - Each game only takes about 20 mins max to play out and are usually much quicker. I don't like multi tabling and you can't really multi table HU so thats a good excuse for getting away from the grinding. I only play one or 2 games at a time at the moment and am really enjoying it. Its very interesting studying your opponents individual style and traits and gets away from the boring ABC sng strategy.

I imagine I'm probably just running well at the moment but from what i read and see, the variance in these should be relatively low so fingers crossed i can keep up a reasonable win rate. I've not actually had a losing day yet. Running a little above EV but not hugely. I started out playing the $6 games for a bit of fun but quite quickly moved up to the $11 games. I've been doing really well in the 4 man HU shoot outs too which has probably helped boost my roi somewhat but its a pleasant start all the same! Hold'em Manager graph with EV line below for just HU & 4 person HU shootout games since the start of the year.

I've signed up to HUsng.com so will watch a few of those videos over the coming month and hopefully improve my game, continue to plug away at them and hopefully continue to see some nice results.
The only downside I've seen so far is that they don't produce much rake and as a result it will be impossible to hit SuperNova playing these all year. If i keep winning at this rate though I'll be able to grind up through the stakes in no time. We'll see how it goes. I want to put in at least 1000 games at about the $11 level before i consider moving up just to prove to myself this isn't just a super hot run.

I'm not ruling out a return to the mtts and mtt sngs sometime soon but my immediate focus is improving my HU game.

On a separate note, i thinking of jumping on the bandwagon of coaching/staking. I've got a few small plans/ideas and am currently coaching a couple of friends to turn them from novices to online superstars. If that goes well, I'll look into taking on some new 'strangers' to coach and mentor and hopefully turn them in to profitable players. I've got a few ideas in my mind of how i can make it affordable and my kind of target market but will play it by ear while i get some feedback of my current 'students' and see how their games progress... If anyone is remotely interested in having a chat about coaching options feel free to get in touch.
If not, i should have something a bit more official in place in the coming months!

In other news... Isildur1 is Viktor Blom?! Who'd have ever thought!