Welcome

Hello all, welcome to my online poker blog.

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.





Tuesday 1 June 2010

Rush folding theory - the commodity of TIME

In a normal poker game, it often pays to play marginal hands since when we're playing fish they give away so much equity post flop. However, often this profit will be small in the long term on average. If we fold these marginally profitable hands we have to wait until the next hand anyway and so playing is obviously superior to folding which has an equity of 0.
In Rush poker, there is a property that exists that does not affect strategy in any other poker game; that is, when we fold in Rush we are immediately dealt another hand. We don't have to wait until the current hand has finished.
Consider being under the gun at a full ring table. We have 22. This is a marginal spot at best in normal poker games, but when we play UTG in Rush this is where our average time spent playing a hand is going to be highest. Therefore it is also the spot where we'll be using up the most potential deals should we decide to play our hand. So we need to take into account the profit we are losing by using up time and deals and the chance of being dealt a strong hand. It is my gut feeling that this equity of folding (not to be confused with folding equity) should have a bearing on strategy.
Playing Rush optimally is likely to include exaggerated positional play. Blind stealing is likely to be valuable still, but the further away from the button we are it is likely to be better to fold in marginal spots and see more deals. I think that (providing we are a winner) folding has some positive average equity that needs to be factored into our decisions. Overall I think that we should be playing tighter than in a normal poker game for this reason and also that position is crucially important.
In Summary...
1. When making a decision we must balance the average profitability of our particular hand with the extra deals we are using up by playing it. Therefore tighter play is probably superior to looser play, both pre flop and post flop.
2. The earlier our position at the table the more time and therefore deals we'll be using up on average. So marginal early position spots should probably always be folds. Button and CO stealing will likely still be profitable though.
If anyone disagrees with my thoughts please share. In particular if it can be shown that folding to see more deals has only a very small positive expectation then most of what I've said can be discounted.

2 comments:

  1. more thought provoking stuff . for the life of me i can't understand why u don't hv more followers especially as u r now specialising in the latest hot topic , RUSH . it fascinates me . However , what has often caught me out when playing AA , KK , QQ is the f**king set miners who will call up to 10bb pre and then me not being able to release when they raise the turn. regards , adam

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  2. Thanks mate :) yeah I struggle in those spots too. With Rush, since we're playing many more hands than usual I think it feels that we're running into sets more often and folding our overpairs can begin to feel really weak, especially if we do it several times in a row. But I still think it's the right play to fold to these turn raises. Simon

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