Everything is the same:
Rush Poker is just like all NL Hold’em games. 2 cards dealt in the hole, 5 cards in the community, at anytime your whole stack is at risk; yet people feel that it’s a completely different game. What makes it different?
1) You are in a player pool, with everyone else and are not sitting at tables. This is probably the biggest difference (and I believe way bigger impact than #2 on the list). Basically all players are put in a pool, and depending on the number of entries in the pool (up to 4 at any 1 stake), determines the number of concurrent hands one can have.
2) The quick fold button. At time during a hand, one can “quick fold” and be transitioned to a new table. The other players won’t know you folded until it is your turn to act. This is what gives the “rush” dynamics of large number of hands per hour and the constant action.
What does this all mean? What can a non-rush poker player learn from rush poker dynamics? Hopefully we can discuss that in this thread, and maybe even talk about some rush specific nuances and see if they also apply.
If you are looking for some strategy, or a recipe, please stop reading right now. This is more of a discussion of how the playing environment affects the poker play.
Why we play:
A big assumption that a lot of people make at the poker player is that all players are playing for the same reason. TO MAKE MONEY! While that may be a common theme for most players, where it is at on the priority list or how we want to make money is different and affects the play. Some players treat money as a “score keeper”, other like the emotional and chemical affect of having money on the line, others want to pay bills or book reservations at The Sizzler and bring a nice lady friend.
Rush poker has some features that attract players:
1) Its constant-immediate action- this is nice for the Fish who want to gamble fast and hard. Its also nice for the regs in us that have patience issues and have lost the gamblers rush by constantly just looking for EV spots.
2) Hands per hour for the regs:
a. 4-tabling Rush you can easily play 1200 hands an hour-this is nice for the grinders, rake back pros, volume junkies. I actually believe this is a double edge sword as I think its harder to play 1200 quality rush hands per hour than it is 1200 hands on standard tables. This can lead to some strange observations we will se later
b. Table Startup, maintenance: For us multi-tablers we know how long it takes to get our table up and start grinding. I typically 12 table regular tables, and on average it too about 25 minutes to get 12 tables going, and this was probably faster than normal since I was addicted to starting tables. Plus we are rarely having 12 tables fully going; usually we are waiting for action on one, adding tables, removing bad ones, scanning the lobby etc. This is probably the biggest reason I personally play rush. I know that in 1 hour of play I can play 1K hands, get my FTP points-RB-Ironman during that time.
c. Favorable Hands per hour: Playing rush we see a lot of this, players who aren’t the strongest and only want to play JJ+, AK+; or 40-60BB who are looking for good commit/semi bluff spots. Whatever the situation; be aware of these players, study them and note them. Like the 20bb SSer in the past; these players are playing a defined strategy that is a different game than you.
3) Deep Stack Play- This is probably one of my most favorite things about Rush over regular tables. Is that I will have several hand very interesting hands a week because the stack sizes make it so. Its fairly common for you to play some 3bet/4bet pots 400bb+. Stack sizes can get big quick, and because it’s a player pool, versus a table dynamic the large stack sizes will come into play. If you study deep stack poker and understand how hand values change dramatically as we get into these large stack, you WR and your interest will go up very quickly.
What do we REALLY know?:
Pretty much we all love HUD’s. They give us so much advance information on our villains that we can make different decision and game plans on everybody. In fact some of us not only have some really obscure stats displayed, we have even created custom stats that can help us decide if the Bet, c/r turn bluff on the turn when the top card paired is perfect for this situation….yeah, we have so much information.
But, with Rush, and the fact that data mining and buying hands is hard to do, and the validity of the stats that we are seeing; its important of focus on what we really, really know.
1) Position
2) Betting Action
3) Board Texture
These are the absolutes in poker, and even more so in Rush Poker. Focusing on how these fundamentals affect ranges, value bets, semi-bluffs, stack-off ranges is essential in all poker success.
Tracking my own sessions, and looking at the villains I do have a significant hand sample-I confirmed what has been stated on this forum many times. Many stats lie. I usually play 1K hand sessions, and the most consistent stat I found for myself is VPIP/PFR. Basically in a short amount of time this stat converges fairly quickly. The next most reliable stat I found was 3bet and fold to 3bet. While these did have some large STDs, they pretty much showed my style of play. ATS, CBET, FCBET, FtoSteal, W$SD, WTSD varied greatly. Same for my villains. I know there is one reg that in the last 5K hands I have on them, I only saw them face a Turn-Cbet 5 times. I thought it was interesting at the time I looked at the stat during the hand, but afterwards it really told me about his range/style of play that I already knew from his VPIP/PFR and the notes I had on him than the actual stat.
So what we can learn from this is use stereotyping and note taking to your advantage, and practice making ranges for those villains.
The effect of the many:
“Woooohoo, I just stacked this guy in my first 15 minutes!....How am I still down 20bb?” – I think a lot of Rush poker players have thought this at some point. We all know that having a sexy redline is cool, but how much money are we bleeding from constantly waiting for the perfect opportunity? What about those bad resteal attempts, that cbet into a mutliway pot? That flop bluff of the 5/3? Yeah why you may not have lost a large pot, 5bb here, 12 bb there-they add up real quick. I am not saying you need to be some LAG to beat poker, but those bad leaks you been ignoring? That Fancy Play syndrome? The epeening? They are costing you way more than you think.
Player Pool and Reg Dynamics:
While poker is villain based, Rush emphasizes playing against a player pool, and the affect of the player pool on other players. We all know that Friday nights play differently than Tuesday morning. Holidays are different than bonus clearing time. But do we really consider how they affect the entire play? Rush we are not having tables stacked, with nice little notes on everyone seated after a few orbits “I like to color nits BLUE after 3 orbits, because they have blue balls….”
Player pools is more than treating someone as an unknown, but the mindset of the other players you may have due to the player pool. They may be tighting up their range, because its reg infested and are looking to survive. They may be going laggy to pick on the nits. Or it could be no-bluff Saturday. No matter what they think they are doing, they are being affected by the play of the player pool. There starting ranges will naturally tend to how the pool is playing, and so will the stack off ranges.
Also, the reg dynamics is different than normal tables. A lot of players confused table dynamics with reg dynamis. “some dude 3bet me 3 times in a row, I am jamming K9s…” that is more of a table dynamic or the tendency of a particular player. This is completely lost at rush, since most players look at their hands and decide if they are going to play it, or potentially play it before they see who is doing what. For there to be a reg dymanic at there needs to be some deep deep history. This has led me to believe that people adjust a lot less than we all think. They may be 3betting light, but they may 3bet all TAGs light, not just you, or they 3bet everyone light in a steal situation. People over adjust way too much, cards, position, opportunity and stereotyping play a much bigger role in how someone plays than some strange hand that may have occurred.
Fight the Rhythm:
I think I have heard most Rush regs say something to the affect “I hate when I get into a Rhythm and quick fold 55” or “How did I lose 41 Buy-in in 25 minutes”. With Rush the action is constant, and its easy to fall into auto-bot or tilt bot mode. For all online players, this is something that needs to be fought constantly. If we are not paying attentions to what is going on around us, we can quickly make bad decisions, or we can see the nasty affect of tilt. Either way its magnified greatly at Rush due to the rapid decisions that need to be made on every hand. I recommend that all players need to learn to break the rhythm and really focus on what we know and what we should do.
