If you missed it, Ryan urbanlightsYu (pictured) final tabled the PokerStars Super Tuesday twice in December, finishing in third place on the 16th and as the runner-up two days before the end of the year. Together, the two un-chopped scores meant over $136,000 in real money along with almost 1,000 PLB Points.

“They were drastically different situations,” Yu told PocketFives. “I came into the first Super Tuesday final table pretty short-stacked, but there were several other short stacks around me and it ended up being a game of survivor between us. The second Super Tuesday, I came in with the chip lead and had an extremely aggressive style until a cooler forced me to settle down four- or five-handed.”

The Super Tuesday is one of the richest tournaments of the week online, boasting a $1,050 buy-in. “I definitely have a lot more confidence in my game,” Yu said when asked how his success in the $1Ks would affect his mindset moving forward. “I have talked a lot of poker and gotten end-game advice from Griff, whom I’ve been friends with before we were MTT players. But, I’m realistic with myself and know I’m having a nice little streak of favorable variance. I need to be level-headed and keep finding +EV spots.”

Is there added pressure playing a tournament with a $1,000 buy-in as opposed to a $200 buy-in like the Sunday Majors? “Not that I can perceive,” Yu assessed. “I felt a lot more pressure at the Sunday Warm-Up final table two months before, and that’s a $200 buy-in.” In that tournament in October 2014, he finished third for $50,000.

As far as the money, Yu said he’ll put it back into his bankroll. He conceded that final tabling the Super Tuesday twice in a month “will probably never happen again. I had to be extremely lucky for it to happen.” All told, he is a scant $10,000 shy of $1 million in career online tournament winnings and sits at a personal high of #227 worldwide in the PocketFives Rankings.

Expect to see quite a bit of Yu in 2015, and we’re not exaggerating. Yu wants to log 4,000 to 5,000 MTTs online, investing about $400,000 in buy-ins between live and online events. He explained, “I’m trying to play around 140 MTTs a week. I have to factor in days spent playing live events too.” He has 1,190 online MTT cashes for his career that average $832 each.

Yu learned to play poker as a kid on cruise ships and in Las Vegas on video poker machines sitting in his dad’s lap. He didn’t really get into the game until the online poker boom, when he ultimately hit up card rooms in Toronto and played Limit games. “I’m not really sure what drew me to poker,” Yu admitted. “It was probably because I loved playing cards and it was a card game where you could make money, which added an extra incentive.”

He has a 10-month-old son who is just learning to crawl, which will undoubtedly mean full baby-proofing of his house. Consequently, when he’s not playing, he’s chasing his kid around and hanging out with his wife.

Congrats to Ryan Yu on his dominance of the Super Tuesday!

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