Alex Wice Reaches SuperNova Level in 39 Hours

In 39 hours and 25 minutes, Alex ‘AWice’ Wice collected the 100,000 VPPs necessary for the PokerStars SuperNova status, becoming the first one to reach the level in 2013. Ryan ‘MouldyOnions’ Bell almost beat him to it but a software error crossed his calculations.

Alex Wice

To reach SuperNova status, a player needs to collect 100,000 VPPs, while 1,000,000 points are needed for the SuperNova Elite level in a calendar year. This is not an easy task, even for multi tabling pros: cash game ace Randy ‘nanonoko’ Lew reached the status as late as December last year.

The record of reaching the SuperNova Elite status is held by Andrew ‘azntracker’ Li, who needed only 2 months to collect the necessary amount of VPPs in 2011.

This record might be broken this year, as Alex Wice kicked off 2012 with an amazing achievement: he took a mere 39 hours and 25 minutes to reach the SuperNova level. What is more, it is not even only Wice who does an insane job in collecting VPPs: Ryan Bell is only slightly behind him.

The two players basically invaded high stakes hyper turbo SNG tables in the new year, possibly in no small part motivated by the fact that the first players to reach SuperNova and SuperNova Elite statuses can expect special bonuses: first SuperNova gets 100,000 extra FPPs and a photo appearance on the 2013 Collectible Card Deck, the first SuperNova Elite gets double VPP and FPP in any 24 hours period of their choice, in addition to the photo appearance on the 2013 Collectible Card Deck.

“I want to give a few details of what happened over the last couple of days.

First, the sprint finish. Basically, in order to catch up to MouldyOnions at the very end, I had to play $60 hypers as well. This was pretty tough and I ended up 50 tabling. If you look at PS steve updates I was getting 6k vpp an hour. This is completely insane, if you cough you are done. (It cannot be compared to tabling hypers in the past because PS has changed the time to act and other rules so it is much faster than it used to be.) Also, I think I had a log file thing too, or something similar. I lagged out of 30 tables with 2k vpp to go. I was very flustered, lol.

In general, for high-count tabling there is extreme stress induced on the body, I think my practice with exercise before hand has helped me sleep and play more comfortably (and feel less anxiety) even though I am still getting used to it. I probably sweated an entire bucket through my hands over the last couple of days -- talcum powder, gloves, and many towels didn't help.

I am happy for this challenge and for MouldyOnions in particular because it allowed me to test myself at the hardest level and rise to the challenge. If you had asked me 2 days ago when I would get SN, I would never have guessed now. Also if no one was close to getting first SN, neither of us would have played as hard,” Wice posted in the 2p2 forum.

Rival player 'MouldyOnions' posted in his blog on the run for the first 2013 SuperNova title:

“That was a fun grind! Alas, first to Supernova wasn’t meant to be. I stopped with around 6k to go, as despite being in the lead from the start I ran into some problems and by the time I fixed them the deficit was insurmountable.

I use my own table opener for registering games and controlling the number of open tables, unfortunately with around 4 hours to go it started to break. I had a good lead and tried everything I could to fix the issue, without knowing exactly why it was happening.

Eventually I discovered that due to the size of the sessions played the Poksters.log.0 file had reached mammoth proportions (circa 400mb). The table opener struggled to handle all that information, which resulted in me missing games as it uses the log file extensively with regards to opening games.

I think near the end it was only registering me for roughly 50% of 200s that popped. It’s pretty stressful knowing how close it was and seeing games start without me as my software lags behind. A few hours ago I thought Supernova was a lock, but software faults can happen to anyone and ultimately lost me the lead, hence I gave up. That being said, huge props to Awice, he did really well – to keep going all day while behind and power thorough to win must be awesome.

Luckily this is just the first lap of a many lap race and while holding the lap record would have been nice I am ultimately most focused on winning the overall race and doing it in the fastest time possible.”

If the two of them was able to keep up their current pace – which is impossible in the long run – they could reach the SuperNova Elite status within two weeks.