For the last few months, Ryan urbanlightsYu (pictured) has been trying his hand at a full-time poker career. The Canadian is nearing $500,000 in tracked online scores, about half of which has come on PokerStars, where he plays under the screen name i need sheet. We caught up with Yu to talk about an incredibly successful start to his career and his life as a professional sports bettor.

PocketFives: Tell us about your recent online poker scores.

Ryan Yu: I have had a pretty good run over the last few months, with two French major wins, two other major final tables, and deep runs in the WCOOP and Sunday Million. I also won a live main event earlier this year.

It started at the end of August. I was making a deep run in the Sunday Million, but at the same time, I was making a big run in the Summer Warm-Up on PokerStars.fr. I wasn’t paying much attention to the PokerStars.fr tournament, to be honest, as I was excited about the Million, but I ended up winning it outright. After that, I came in seventh in the iPoker Sunday Special and won a Winamax W-Series event for €20,000.

Two days later, I had a super deep run in the WCOOP $1K for $14,000. I won my first Triple Crownin May, but toward the end of April, I played a Sunday session with Flush_Entity(pictured) and paulgees81. Watching those two beasts play consolidated a lot of the ideas I had in my head. It validated some of the abnormal lines I sometimes took and also fixed common leaks I never knew I had.

PocketFives: Tell us about the leaks you had and how you went about fixing them.

Ryan Yu: Until recently, I had a lot of basic leaks in my game because I’ve been focusing so much on improving my end game that I was kind of spewey during the earlier levels. I was never taught the fundamentals of MTTs; I dove in and learned by myself. I tried watching training videos and even tried coaching, but I’m not good with studying. I need to keep repeating things over and over until they become intuitive.

I kept nagging at Flush_Entity and paulgees81 during that Sunday, asking basic questions about hands. A lot of the time, they looked at me like I was dumb, but I had to know if some of the basic concepts I taught myself were valid or nowhere close to being optimal.

I met jjyykk, another top reg, in Korea. We have become pretty good friends and he has given me a few pointers on my game. He is an articulate guy and can explain complex concepts to me in a really understandable way without over-pontification.

I didn’t become a full-time poker player until four or five months ago. Before then, I was a full-time sports bettor and spent all of my time analyzing edges, but the two types of gambling are a lot more similar than people think. They are all about bankroll management, finding edges over conventional lines, and taking risks when you need to. The variance is also very similar to MTTs.

A friend of mine asked how I played the two French majors to outright victories and I said that my sports background helped. I’ve won and lost a lot more in sports before, so the pay jumps didn’t affect me as much as they normally would. I think this allowed me to play more optimally while others were looking to fold into pay jumps.

Betting on sports has way more volume and has been around for a lot longer, so the market is closer to being a perfect market. Therefore, the edges are smaller in sports. In poker, especially in tournaments, there are still lots of amateurs and that means there is still a lot of money to be made.

PocketFives: How did you get started in poker originally?

Ryan Yu: My family loves card games. We aren’t crazy gamblers; we just all loved strategy games. In the early 1990s when Vegas was still centered on Freemont Street, kids were allowed to sit at the slot machines with their parents. My dad taught me poker hands while playing video poker. From when I was a child, it was ingrained in me that you could win at gambling games as long as you took unconventional approaches and played on logic and not impulse.

PocketFives: Is there anyone you’d like to recognize?

Ryan Yu: I want to give a shout out to Tae, Tyson, Dave, and Lawrence at Walker Hill Poker Room, and jjyykk and Flush_Entity too.

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