As someone who played hypers and HUSNGs in general for 3+ years, I will chime in and share some of my personal take on this game (mostly on hypers, but turbos/regspeeds included):

a) Preflop-only game has been thoroughly studied (by preflop-only game, I mean the one where hands end preflop by either a fold or two all-ins and there is no postflop play). People are still making mistakes, but those are relatively small ones.

b) Postflop game is being quite far from getting solved, and people are making lots of terrible mistakes. In general, HUSNG regs are caught up with this idea of "population tendency" to which their range and strategy seem to have been tailored. As a result, they make lots of frequency mistakes, most of which can be easily exploited by someone whose style doesn't fall into the range of "population tendency."

I did a bit of experiment a few months after quitting this game. I played 1-1.5k games exclusively against lowstakes (~$100) and midstakes ($200) regs, and found a spot where they made the same mistake over and over again for 95%+ of the time.

c) Hypers have had this weird atmosphere with "cartels" formed at each stake, and regs therein (or regs who try to get in) had to care as much, if not more, about "cartel stuff" than improving their poker skill. Cartel has been around for more than a year now, but I doubt their skill level has improved much at $500 and lower.

At the same time, as the reg vs reg match % has increased, there is now less merit for sharing your knowledge either by posting on fora or making vids, and you won't see too many hyper regs (openly) talking strat. Also, despite all the mistakes they are still making, this game inherently offers you a fairly small edge and lots of variance, which requires you to put in a lot of volume to iron out variance and make good profit. For example, I wonder if regs at $300 and lower can shoot for 2%+ ROI against each other (for ~51.5% winrate).

-- midori

inb4 midori hu sng coach for rio.

is that because 5000NL is so shallow stacked in general? Im sorry I dont keep up with the current states of the nosebleeds

Because he's simply a very good player.

''Beating 5kNL'' is pretty vague. It's not that hard for a midstakes reg to beat a 5kNL game if there's a whale. The bumhunting average regs way outnumber the elite regs.
Colman definitely wouldn't win in a lineup full of elite regs, but that's probably not what he must have claimed.

Pretty sure you meant Daniel Negreanu, Coleman was the one who snap offered to bet 1 mil against him and said DNegs had no chance.

I don't know why you & GameTheory are so shocked by the comment. He has an extremely successful background. He came up fast with little resistance in the HUSNG world all the way to the top from what I've read. He was personally coached by Olivier Busquet. He seems to be on his "A" game right now, extremely well rolled, and if he really wanted to ever prove it and "just win" at those stakes I'm sure he could easily sit 40bb deep and absolutely crush, but he probably would never do such a pussy thing, I think he'd buy full.

Playing does not equal studying. Dan Colman probably knows how much time he spent studying tournaments. So you cannot conclude that it took him more time than one week.

You caught me this time.

It is also very common for cashgame players to feel like they are way above husng players when it comes to poker theory and that they can just waltz in there and beat the highest stakes, so it goes both ways.

Cash game players wouldn't last one orbit in a HU SNG.