This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps. Actually, this is what happens when you play a lot of Heads-Up Hypers. According to Jason Philpott (pictured), who is known on PocketFives as bubbleoutcas, playing a bunch of Heads-Up Hypers can give you the edge in tournaments like the Full Tilt Sunday Brawl, which he won earlier this month and ran off with $40,000.

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The $256 buy-in tournament places a $40 bounty on each player’s head and brought out a field of nearly 1,000 that fateful day. Philpott said of his win, “It feels great. I had been going deep in these big tournaments and coming up short for a while, so it was nice to close one out. It didn’t feel real.”

Now, we’ll get to the heart of the matter: his proficiency in, and effects of, Heads-Up Hypers: “I have been playing a lot of Heads-Up Hypers over the last six months,” Philpott commented. “I feel comfortable now, especially as the stack sizes get closer to 25 big blinds. I have been playing them for a few reasons. First, I moved up to Montreal six months after Black Friday and got lucky that my realtor was moving a Heads-Up Sit and Go pro in across the street. I started watching him, met some friends, started playing a few, and realized how much better it made my post-flop and hand reading skills.”

He added, “In June of last year, I started playing more and more of them and so I ditched the 180-man sit and gos because these offered much more earning potential. They were lower variance than MTTs and better suited to a more balanced lifestyle.” In MTTs that PocketFives tracks, he has recorded nearly $700,000 in earnings, most of which has come on PokerStars.

As he alluded to, he made the move up to Canada. Philpott grew up in Northern Virginia and went to college in the area as well. “Moving away was tough,” Philpott conceded. “I went to a city where I didn’t know anyone and had to spend a lot of time grinding to make money. I made some friends with guys who played Heads-Up Sit and Gos and moved in with jackstack99at the end of June. Living and grinding with a good friend was infinitely better.”

He tends not to gravitate toward cash games or non-Hold’em games and instead tries to stick with his most profitable activities. He explained, “I realizedthe only way to get better at MTTs was to learn hand-reading through either cash games or Heads-Up Sit and Gos, so I went the latter route. Coming from a sit and go background, which was mostly push/fold, my post-flop skills were pretty bad a year ago.”

Whatever he has done has worked, as in the last two months of 2012, he had two wins in the PokerStars $109 Turbo 2X Chance for over $43,000 total.

This week marks the beginning of the annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Philpott is heading out to the Nevada desert the first week of June and won a package on 888 Poker worth $4,000 that will see him in Vegas from July 3 to 7.

He explained, “I just moved into Downtown Toronto and hadn’t had much of a chance to play poker before that, so I am planning on grinding a ton in Vegas and getting some workouts in. They have a $220 WSOP satellite on 888 every other Saturday. I figured it would be pretty soft, so I gave it a shot. I don’t think I have ever won a significant satellite, so I was really excited.”

The same day as his Sunday Brawl win, Philpott finished eighth in the 888 Poker Whale and earned another $5,600. Scores like those have helped him rise to #60 in the PocketFives Online Poker Rankings for Canada and #357 worldwide.

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