Value betting the river – a feat of bravery?

Value betting the river: an issue I’m particularly interested in lately as I feel I’m not on my A-game when it comes to it. I’m not a particularly sensational online poker player. I generally win though and close out my sessions with 1-2 buy-ins profit, but I play small stakes where there are plenty of fish and I don’t think I could hold my own on higher ones, nor am I willing to dedicate myself exclusively to poker. I’ve lately noticed that one of the most frequent and costly mistakes that I made, was linked to value betting the river. You’re probably familiar with the situation yourself: you hit a monster hand and you begin stuffing the pot. There’s one caller who plays right into your plan. He calls each and every one of your moves and you begin to wonder. You put him on a monster draw based on the board, then on the river, you begin to suspect he might’ve hit his draw. When he checks the river to you, instead of firing out that value bet, you check too, afraid to get more chips into the pot, and basically settling for what’s already in the middle. That pot’s big enough – you tell yourself and you show down the monster against the other guy’s top pair of measly two pair. I know that there’s NEVER enough money in the pot yet I do sometimes commit the mistake.

Here’s an actual example for such a situation. You pick up pocket jacks and hit Q,J,2,5,4 on the board. You do what’s right and keep building the pot: you’re the one controlling the betting, but there’s this one guy who keeps check-calling everything you throw at him. You then skip the value bet on the river and show down your trips for the win.
Apparently, I’m not the only one struggling with this problem though. Winning and losing players both seem to commit this mistake, and it ends up costing everyone money. While the issue seems to be simple enough, in practice it’s not that simple at all. There seems to be a complex psychological phenomenon behind it, called the “uncertainty effect”. Apparently, we humans have it encoded in our instincts to fear and thus to avoid uncertain situations as much as possible. What this means is that when you do get yourself to fire out that all-important value bet on the river, you are in fact acting against human nature, and as such you’re basically transcending your own condition. Wow, that sounds a little intimidating…Does it really take that sort of a commitment and focus to fire out that simple bet? Apparently, it does. Psychologists know about the uncertainty effect and its existence has been proven numerous times under various circumstances. All those experiments point to one conclusion: when presented with two choices, one of which involves a very limited degree of uncertainty, people will almost always opt for the other choice. So, next time you miss that apparently simple value bet on the river, tell yourself that your instincts are the ones driving you to this mistake. If you know what you’re up against, who knows, you may find it easier to tackle the issue.

You may also want to know that the mistake is a result of the emotional cost one has to pay to make that bet. That emotional cost may be higher than the extra revenue squeezed out through that value bet on the river. Risk aversion may be extremely useful in certain survival situations, and as such it is definitely a useful legacy, but it needs to be put aside at the poker table. At the table, mathematics should guide you and logic should take precedence over everything else.

The truly weird thing is though, that sometimes this same instinctual risk aversion should come in extremely handy at the poker table too. Some people are ready to give up pocket rockets in the early stages of a tournament for instance, when faced with multiple callers, just to preserve their stack which is their tournament lifeblood. Under those circumstances, risk aversion is correct. Even though you’re quite certain you’re the one holding the best hand at the table, being faced with so many drawing hands means the uncertainty of the call becomes bigger. The potential gains are massive too, but just staying alive at that stage is your utmost priority. What it comes to survival, you should listen to your instincts. When it comes to making money though, and maximizing your gains through a well placed river value-bet, you’re better off putting them aside.

Poker is indeed a truly marvelous game, one that involves so many different psychological, instinctual, and mathematical elements that it never ceases to amaze me. One thing is certain about it: you won’t ever stop learning new things for as long as you play, provided you keep your eyes and mind open.

Using poker stats tracking software at the online poker table

Using poker tracking software may seem cumbersome in the beginning, and you may feel uneasy setting it up, but trust me: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s not date mining, since all you’ll be using is data that’s available to you anyway. Because poker tracking software can collect this data and compile it into reports you’d never be able to come up with on your own, you’ll gain a nice little insight into your opponent’s play as well as your own. As a direct consequence, you’ll be able to fine-tune your approach, while getting in-depth reads on your opponents. Your profits will soar, and you’ll get an entirely different kick out of playing.

I know that analyzing and interpreting data spat out by your poker tracker may be daunting at first, but it’s not really rocket science and once you get the hang of it, you’ll be wondering how you ever managed to get by without such a digital assistant.
Your poker tracking software displays the statistics it compiles through a HUD (heads-up display) which will appear next to your opponent’s name and update displayed information in real time. It uses all sorts of abbreviations to express the stats it’s tracking. Here’s a brief rundown of these stats, complete with tips to interpreting them.

There are two sorts of stats your poker tracker generates: preflop and post-flop ones. Both kinds are important when it comes to gaining clues about your opponent’s style of play. Let’s begin with the preflop stats.
The VPIP% (Voluntarily Put Into Pot), provides a % estimation of the number of times your opponent voluntarily puts money into the pot. Money pushed into the pot on the blinds is obviously not voluntarily contributed money. The VPIP% is relatively easy to interpret: the higher it is, the looser your opponent is. The lower it is, the tighter he plays. A normal value for the average VPIP% would be between 19-24%. Anything off that spectrum should ring your alarm bell.
The PFR% (preflop Raise) is the preflop raise percentage. This stat expresses the number of times your opponent raises preflop. This really only makes sense when used in combination with the VPIP%. A normal value for the PFR% would be between 4-5% of the VPIP. The difference between the VPIP and the PFR gives you your opponent’s cold-calling range. If it’s too big, you’re obviously dealing with a fish.

The 3b% (Three bet) tells you how often your opponent 3-bets before the flop. 3% would be a normal value for a tight player who only three bets AA, KK, AK, and AQs.
The F3 (Fold to Three bet) is the frequency with which your opponent yields to pressure on a 3-bet before the flop. If your opponent has a high F3 percentage, that means he’s vulnerable to light three bets, which means you’ve found an obvious breach in his strategy.

While you can use all these stats to pinpoint weaknesses in your opponents’ play, you can also use them keep identify your own mistakes. That way, you’ll know where you need to tweak your style in order to become much more efficient.
All these stats have a meaning on their own, but on a more subtle level, they’re also interconnected. The relations between these stats are the ones that are going to give you the most valuable conclusions.

Let us now take a look at the post-flop stats.
The AG is your opponent’s aggression factor. The normal number for the aggression factor is 1-3. 4 would mean a very aggressive opponent, while 0.5 means a very passive approach. It’s quite obvious how you should use this stat: if your 0.5 AG guy makes a post-flop raise, you’d better believe he has the goods.
The WTSD (Went to Showdown) gives you an idea about how big a percentage of your opponent’s post-flop hands get to see a showdown. This stat can give you a whole host of reads on your opponent. With the normal value set between 20-32%, a low WTSD means your opponent is either folding a lot after the flop, or he’s so aggressive he makes his opponents fold all the time. The AG will tell you which of the two situations you’re dealing with.
The CB is your opponent’s Continuation Betting percentage. It tells you how many times he chooses to continuation bet a hand that he’d raised preflop. The normal value for most players is between 55-88%. Again, to get the most out of this stat, you need to use it in conjunction with another one: the PFR%. The lower one’s PFR%, the higher his CB should be. If it’s not, you’ve just found an exploitable weakness.
The 2B tells you how often your opponent chooses to fire out a second bet after a post-flop continuation bet. This stat has to be used in conjunction with the CB one obviously, to make any sort of sense.

The FC (Fold to Continuation bet) tells you how often a player lets others victimize him with their continuation bets. This stat gives you valuable clues on what sort of hands your opponent plays. If his FC is high, it means he likes to have the goods in the pocket before making a move. If it’s low, he’s the more adventurous type, who likes to take risks on marginal hands. Using the FC in conjunction with the VPIP% is a true reads-generator.
The F2 is the number of times a guy folds to a second barrel bet. You know all those fish who chase their hands way too far and who end up folding to pressure when they realize they’re not going to make a decent hand? The F2 is the best way to spot these guys.

In order for any of the above described stats to yield relevant results, you need to have as large a sample-size as possible. Taking a seat at the table and drawing conclusions on your opponents after the first couple of hands played, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The longer you play and the more hands your tracker gets to analyze, the more accurate its statistics will be, and the more usable its stats will become. This is exactly the reason why you cannot grow dependant on your poker tracker. Use it as an aid, as an assistant, but don’t come to rely exclusively on the data it provides. You’ll still need your own skills and poker instincts.

Isildur1’s return to Full Tilt’s nosebleed tables

Last time I wrote about Isildur1 he was losing money while trying to maneuver his way back to the nosebleed stakes at Full Tilt Poker, apparently unsuccessfully. I even came to question whether or not he was indeed able to bounce back and I was made to wonder whether his first incursion into the world of nosebleed stakes cash games had in fact been a work of chance.

Now however, it looks like he’s managed to claw and bite his way back, and in the process he’s exacted some sweet revenge too, on some of the guys that sent him into exile the first time around. Isildur1’s nemesis, Brian Hastings, the player no one had really heard about before the sensational session which virtually felted Isildur1, was obviously at the top of the Swede’s hit-list. The two players locked horns at the PLO tables (Isildur1 prefers NL Holdem), and when everything was said and done, Isildur1 was $504,780 up on his opponent, getting back some of the $4.2 million he’d dropped to him in December last year.

He did get hold of the player purportedly responsible for his demise, Brian Townsend too, but that run-in didn’t end quite as auspiciously for Isildur1. Let’s first take a closer look at his match against Hastings though.
It all came together on Tuesday night and it must’ve been a dream scenario for the mystery Swede indeed. He finally got his hands on the person who’d pocketed no less than $4.2 million from him in a single session and he wasn’t going to let him get away without a thorough trouncing. Sure enough, during the one and a half hour long session, Isildur1 dominated the action. The biggest pot, a $274,197 monster, went to Isildur1 too, when his K-high straight crushed Hasting’s hand for the win.

The success was all the more impressive as Isildur1 came off a $1.18 million winning streak, during which he collected money from Justin Bonomo, Ilari Sahamies, Tom Dwan and a bunch of other players. Isaac Haxton proved to be an obstacle he couldn’t get around though. The 30-hour span during which Isildur1 amassed all those winnings started out at the $200/$400 PLO tables where he locked horns with Kostritsyn, Di Dang and Ashton Griffin among others. At the end of that outing, Isildur1 was $238k up, so he proceeded to take on Isaac Haxton at the $100/$200 NL Holdem tables. NL Holdem is Isildur1’s favorite game, the one at which he considers himself the most competitive, though his best proved to be insufficient against Haxton. Widely recognized as one of the best NL Holdem specialists, Haxton proved to be a handful for Isildur1. He took about $90k off him, but that didn’t even slow the Swede down. He went up the stakes to $200/$400, and he got Justin Bonomo to the table. That proved to be the winning move for the Swede. During a 2 and a half hour long massacre, he relieved ZeeJustin of more than half a million dollars. The largest pot weighed in at $171k, and needless to say, it ended up in Isildur1’s possession. The Swede’s top set put away Bonomo’s flopped two pair for this one.

Justin’s backer pulled out when the going got really serious, so ZeeJustin suddenly found himself in the position of not being able to continue.
Despite the fact that he just took his largest ever single session loss, Bonomo still had his eyes on the prize at the end of the slaughter. He said he was still up overall for February and that he would play Isildur1 again to try to get some of his money back.
His hunger only tickled by the crumbs dropped by Bonomo, Isildur1 was still out looking for a victim on Tuesday. He played Ilari Sahamies at PLO and took some $116k off him.
He then joined a whole bunch of guys at the $300/$600 tables and began to play Dwan heads-up while at it at one point.

Always a reliable emergency-ATM for Isildur1, Dwan didn’t let him down this time either. The New Jersey Wonderkid dropped a massive $232k to the Swede, further deepening the $5 million hole he had dug way back when Isildur1was still rocking and rolling last year.
The biggest pot of that session was a $254k monster that landed in Isildur1’s pocket after his 10-high straight made short work of Dwan’s two pair. The two of them got into a little bit of an argument when Isildur1 tried to convince Dwan to move the action over to the NL Holdem tables.
These were the events leading up to the Hastings trouncing, which was probably one of the more satisfying moments of the Swede’s online poker career. Clearly on a roll (that’s quite a bit of an understatement there), Isildur1 then got overly confident or maybe a tad too greedy to dispense even more justice. He committed the mistake of tangling with the man responsible for putting together his hand histories and providing Hastings the valuable data which allowed the Cardrunners pro to run him off the tables back in 2009: the head of all evil, the boss-monster, Brian Townsend himself.
This clash took place at the $300/$600 PLO tables, and it didn’t start out well for the Swede at all. Townsend got out to a $500k lead within the first half hour of the battle, and things never really looked good for Isildur1 from there. He did manage to get back to about even but it all was downhill for him from that point. When the carnage was over, Isildur1 was about $657k short – not exactly the best way to get payback from his arch nemesis.
In between the Hastings and Townsend sessions, he lost a further $251k back to Justin Bonomo, so in the end, Tuesday didn’t really prove to be a productive day for him.
All this nosebleed stakes bustle leaves us certain of one thing though: Isildur1 is back, and he’s meaner than before. Hopefully, this time he’ll manage to hang on for longer than before too. Fish or shark, his presence at the tables is a blessing for the online poker industry from just about every respect.

Limit Holdem – a few words on the subject

The father of Texas Hold’em games, limit holdem has been steadily losing popularity lately. There are online players who consider themselves experienced and who have never even played a single hand of limit holdem. That fact says a lot about just where limit holdem is currently situated popularity wise.
People tend to avoid the betting structure for various reasons, unfortunately, most of the haters base their stance on false assumptions and myths. There’s nothing peculiar about Limit holdem, and in many respects it is still superior to NL Holdem. Casinos and poker rooms love it. Because players will not buy in and lose their stack within a few minutes, they’ll end up contributing more rake. Limit holdem also offers beginners the possibility to accumulate some short term winnings. For a beginner, limit holdem is not a bad choice at all.

First of all: everyone plays NL and PL these days, which means that those games have become oversaturated with talent and thus pretty tough to beat. Players come in, and drop their bankrolls in fewer than 100 hands, never to log in again – fish just don’t last at the tables. Secondly, NL and PL Holdem have become infinitely more aggressive. Aggression is the way to play these days, and what that does is that it raises variance. Increased variance puts a strain on bankrolls, but it also puts players under more psychological pressure, which means more tilting.
FL Poker is more of a beginner’s game in the sense that it’s built upon a much more solid math-based foundation. It is easier to learn to dominate FL poker than it is to make money consistently at the PL and NL tables.

A downside of FL Holdem is the influence the poker rake has on player profits. On micro stakes (on which several poker rooms do not even collect rake) the problem is not as obvious. As one goes up the limits though, the rake towers up as a more and more difficult to beat hurdle. A good rakeback deal can take a lot of the bite out of it though, and a poker prop deal may even turn it around altogether, so the poker rake isn’t something impossible to circumvent either.
Just to illustrate how wrong people are when they tag NL Holdem as far superior to everything else that’s out there, I’ll tackle and dismember one of the most common myths haters bring up pretty much every time they talk about FL Holdem: the loss of value premium starting hands like A,A and K,K experience at the FL tables.

Just take a look at any poker forum or FL Holdem article comment section: I can guarantee it that you’ll find several people complaining about how the inflexible betting structure prevents them from mounting an efficient defense of their premium starting hands. Everyone at the table ends up calling them, which results in their pocket rockets being cracked with a far bigger frequency than at NL tables. There are so many things wrong with this myth I don’t even know where to begin. People complaining about how pocket rockets are worth zilch at the FL Holdem tables are obviously fish and they’re fish on multiple levels. Most of the fish consider picking up an A,A a ticket to taking down the pot.
They utterly fail to take the odds into consideration: if you’re a 90% favorite in a hand, that means 10% of the time, you will end up with a loss. You’re never guaranteed a win simply by picking up A,A and I’ll illustrate exactly why what you think is a defense of your starting hand in NL poker is not something nearly as effective as you think it is.

Let’s consider a 10-handed NL Hold’em table. You pick up pocket rockets, and all your opponents pick up non-random hands like K,K, Q,Q, A,K, suited connectors and suited one-gappers. Against this selection of non random hands, your rockets will carry about 28% odds. If we consider a random selection of hands, your odds go up to around 31%. What that means is that you win once every three times you go to showdown against all your opponents on your pocket rockets. Yes indeed, you lose twice as many times as you win (a fact which is probably the source of the myth) but because of the implied odds, it’s still an excellent proposition. Here’s why: Suppose you can stuff 10 units of chips into the pot every time you pick up pocket rockets. Your opponents do what they’re supposed to according to the critics: they call you all the way.

That means you lose 20 units of chips the first two times, and you win 90 units the third time. You walk away with a 70 unit profit, which is not bad at all. The fact that you cannot push anyone out and get called by all your opponents adds to the variance, but it adds to your eventual profit as well. The bottom line is: as long as you have the best odds on your hand (and pocket rockets always give you the best odds) it doesn’t matter how many callers you get. The jerkier variance rate is smoothened out in the long run anyway. In NL Holdem, where you can protect your hand, you’ll only push out hands with the worst odds. Those with reasonable ones are likely to hang around. Unlike in NL Holdem where losing on pocket rockets can eat up your entire stack, in FL Holdem, there’s a set limit to the money you can lose, which means you’ll be able to bounce back and you’ll give those implied odds a chance to work.

I know what you’ll say: you get a 70 unit profit with 9 other players at the table. When there are fewer players though, your profit rate goes down. With three opponents at your table, you’d only pocket a 10 unit profit. That would be true, but your odds increase as the number of players goes down. With three other players at your table, the odds on your pocket rockets would be close to 64%, which means you’d win 2 of every 3 showdowns on your rockets, which in turn means your profit rate would stay high.

In conclusion: contrary to appearances, pocket rockets are great starting hands in FL Holdem too. They may induce steeper variance, but stuffing the pot on them makes just as much sense as it does at the NL tables.
Play FL poker and an entirely new range of possibilities will open up for you. There are several exotic poker variants played with this betting structure, poker variants which still feature fish despite the lower traffic volume, poker variants where there are still pretty big edges to exploit.

Double or Nothing poker strategy

Before I even begin this article, I need to set one thing straight: Double or Nothings are SNGs (usually 10-handed STTs) in which half the starting field doubles up their buy-ins while the remaining half keeps a stiff upper lip and takes a walk empty handed. Double or Nothings are a relatively recent addition to online poker rooms’ SNG sections, and they seem to have been created in response to player’s needs to have some solid way to build up their small bankrolls. The most diverse Double or Nothing SNGs are available at Poker Stars.
Because of the increased odds that they offer individual players, Double or Nothing SNGs do indeed provide a reasonable way to build up a newly started micro-bankroll, but do they really offer as good a deal as they apparently do? If you take deeper look through the lens of some basic mathematics, you’ll discover something you may not like. Because exactly half the players make it to the money, your chances of cashing in one of these Double or Nothing tournaments is exactly 50-50. Because as soon as the money bubble bursts, the tournament is essentially over, you cannot make more than the money you get for making it past the bubble. The problem is that because of the tournament fee, you do not really double up. From a strictly mathematical perspective this makes Double or Nothing SNGs negative expected value games. Of course, the above reasoning does not take it into account that your skill levels may be superior to that of your opponents and that may give you an edge which would distort the 50-50 odds mentioned above. Another thing to take into account is that Double or Nothing tournaments are apparently grinders’ tourneys. Many people multi-table DoNs and therefore they may not be able to focus on any of their tables as much as they may need to in order to play their best. Signing up to a rakeback deal or to a poker prop deal is another way to mess up the above equation, as rakeback deals cut into the tournament fees.

How exactly do you approach these DoNs from a strategy perspective though? Since they’re SNGs, SNG strategy should be your home base. In the early stages of a DoN, you should play a tight-aggressive game, with an extra accent on tight. Protect your stack as it’s your only weapon at the table and in the same time it represents your life blood as well. Only play premium starting hands, and keep an eye on your position. You shouldn’t just fold everything though: be aggressive on the monster hands you pick up, and add to your stack if possible. Because you’re so tight during the early stages, you’ll have plenty of time to observe your opponents and to make your reads. Let them knock each-other out, and keep studying the survivors.

During the middle stages of a DoN, you need to behave exactly as you do in a regular SNG: start stealing blinds. Due to the fact that the growth of the blinds will give you better pot odds and because you will simply be a victim of the circumstances, the stealing of blinds becomes extremely important during this stage. When stealing blinds, position is the most important concept. Only make your moves from late position, or you risk becoming the one stolen from.
Now, I realize that stealing blinds is not done on rock solid starting hands, but do try to make your move on hands which carry at least some equity. Obviously, in order to steal blinds, you’ll have to loosen up considerably compared to your early-stage attitude.

So far, basic SNG strategy worked just fine for the DoN. As the money bubble approaches though, things precipitate. In a normal SNG, I’d recommend you to take up the “fox” attitude instead of the “farmer” one. By becoming a fox, you’d be able to take advantage of your opponent’s bubble-tightness, setting yourself up for a deep run or even a possible win. I’m sorry to say this, but in a DoN, being a fox makes no sense whatsoever. The nature of the game kills that strategy-option. You’ll have no choice but to become a farmer yourself. The only problem is that – since they’re inclined to do it anyways – most players will have no problems adopting the farmer stance. Because you’ll all be farmers, you’ll find it extremely difficult to abuse your opponents in any way at this stage.
The decisive element in a DoN, once the bubble is reached, is schooling. Players on bigger stacks will gang up on weaklings in a common effort to eliminate them and thus to sail into the money. This ganging up phenomenon occurs in most SNGs yet there’s so little one can read about it. To take advantage of it, it is imperative that you do not arrive to the money bubble being the short-stack, or you risk becoming the one the others will gang up on.

Rush Poker strategy at Full Tilt Poker

Rush Poker- everyone’s talking about Full Tilt Poker’s new creation these days. A game which has completely done away with downtimes: a poker player’s dream, isn’t it? The disappearance of downtimes comes at a cost at the Rush Poker tables, one that not all poker enthusiasts may be willing to pay: the strategy depth of the game takes a huge hit. Being taken from one table to another within a second and playing each and every hand against a different bunch of opponents means that you can take your player reading skills, your table image and your range balancing antics and toss them right out the window: at Rush Poker, you’ll have no use for such “old fashioned” skills. This game is about speed, and about squeezing in as many hands per hours as possible (and if you multi-table Rush Poker, as many as 2,400 hands can be squeezed into the hour). Playing this staggering a number of hands only makes sense though if you can secure EV+ at the Rush Poker tables. The good news is that while the psychological elements of the game are pretty much gone, the ones based on pure math and odds calculus, remain.

Your opponents won’t be able to read your actions either, nor will they be able to sell you their table image. Rush Poker is the big equalizer. In a regular cash game, the majority of your profits came from the fish. Even if you were a truly outstanding player, one that could easily mop the floor with the other regulars, the majority of your profits would still come from the fish.

In Rush Poker, you won’t know who’s a fish and who’s not, so you’re best off sticking to good old ABC TAG poker.
The cool thing about Rush Poker is that you can optimize your TAG game by playing tighter than ever. In a normal setting, people would catch on to what you’re after, but in Rush Poker, there’s no way in hell anybody will ever take advantage of your excessive tightness. You start every hand with a clean record. Nobody will ever know that you folded 20 hands to get aggressive on those pocket rockets now. You have no reason to commit any chips on less than ideal starting hands. The presence of that quick-fold button will kill every reason to do so.
What you’re looking for are players who call you when you have A,A, on A,K or less. Look for great starting hands, set mine (set mining still works wonderfully and you’ll be able to exploit the implied odds even better than at the regular tables), and don’t be shy to value bet all the time.

You do have to consider the fact that other players will tighten up as well and they will raise the quality standards on their starting hands too. The simple presence of that quick-fold button will mean that your opponents will have no reasons to play subpar hands either.

The Big Blind is special in Rush Poker. It is the only position which does not have the quick-fold button available from the get go. The player in the BB will have to wait for a raise to have the quick-fold button displayed. Therefore, assuming that the Big Blind is as tight with his starting hand selection as the other players, is incorrect. The BB is also tempted to light three-bet a lot, another weakness which can be potentially exploited.

The differences between short handed and full ring Rush Poker are immense. While short handed Rush games play out a lot like regular short handed games, full ring Rush Poker games are nothing like a full ring regular poker game. The more players there are at your Rush Poker table, the tighter you should play. Short handed games call for a looser starting hand selection at Rush Poker too.

These days, when Rush Poker is still a novelty and when scores of people play Rush Poker just for the heck of it, there are still exploitable angles in the game. As the novelty wears off though and as players becomes gradually accustomed to the new game, valuable edges will be more and more difficult to come by. You’re going to have to look for value somewhere else, and the place where you’ll find it is in rakeback. That’s right. Besides providing a never before experienced rush to poker players, Rush Poker offers a similar rush to the poker room too: it generates much more rake for the room than any other normal game ever could. That means you’ll need some solid, re-occurring edges if you’re serious about beating the poker rake. As the games themselves get slowly but surely stripped of value, you’ll only find that edge in rakeback. Fortunately, unlike other big poker rooms, Full Tilt Poker still has a rakeback offer for its new players. At 27%, it is definitely not among the most generous rakeback deals available, but it is a hell of a lot more than zilch. This thrifty rakeback deal can prove to be a huge edge in Rush Poker in the long-run. The only problem is that if you already have a rakeback-less account at Full Tilt Poker, you won’t ever be allowed to take advantage of the rakeback deal. If you’re thinking about joining Full Tilt Poker just for the sake of Rush Poker, make sure you sign up for a rakeback account.

Full Tilt’s Rush Poker: boom or bust?

These days, the online poker world is abuzz with Full Tilt’s newest (copyrighted) invention: Rush Poker. It looks like everyone I talk to has already tried the new game, and they’re all delighted with it. They’ve all won at it too.

Now, that leaves several possibilities open. It’s either that all my friends are excellent poker players and they have all indeed taken cash off the Rush Poker tables, or that they’re just a bunch of liars, or that everyone playing Rush Poker wins. That however is highly unlikely as it raises an even more unsettling question: if everyone wins, where the heck does all the money come from?

Anyway, let’s stop the jest right here and let us take a serious look at the things that Rush Poker has going for it and at the things that it doesn’t. A few days ago I read a poker forum somewhere where a poster said something like: this will either be a huge success or a huge bust. Which one will Rush Poker be?

 

Most players who’ve given it a go and most professional players who have expressed an opinion about it, seemed to love it. After all, what is the most annoying thing in online poker as we know it today? The down-times, of course. You pick up an 8,2o, you fold it and then you’re forced to sit there and watch those lucky enough to have picked up better starting hands, play. While this may be great to establish reads on your opponents, everyone will agree that it’s boring as hell.

Rush Poker eliminates all these downtimes. Don’t like your hand? Click “quick fold” and off you go, to another table where the prospect of a monster starting hand awaits you. This allows players to log an unheard-of number of hands each hour, forever changing the face of promotions like sign-up bonuses, rake races, and that of the bog bad wolf itself: rakeback. Rakeback and poker rake are the key words in Rush Poker and I’ll get back to why that is the case shortly.

What other advantages does Rush Poker offer though over its traditional counterparts? In addition to the change of pace (that’s an understatement if I ever saw one), it offers players more privacy, not to mention protection against data mining. Don’t shrug that off…the Isildur1-Brian Hastings incident has drawn a lot of attention to data mining and to its negative effects on the industry lately, and some poker networks have already begun implementing anti-data mining measures to prevent such incidents from ever occurring again. Rush Poker deals a devastating blow to data mining through its very nature. Whisked from one table to another at the speed of light (well, at the speed allowed by their internet connections anyway) players have no time to create profiles on opponents, and not too many reasons to do so either: after all, they’ll be playing their next hand at a different table, so what’s the use of reading one’s current opponents?

 

This “advantage” that I just presented above, is Rush Poker’s biggest shortcoming in the same time, and it’s not a small deal at all. It’s not just a grain of sand caught up in the cogs of the mechanism, it’s a big piece of dirt, one that may end up derailing the whole project. Why? You may ask… Simply because the fact that you’re continuously jumping from one table to another kills the very essence of poker. Poker is supposed to be a game of skill, based on a combination of math and psychology. Take away any of these two components and you’re left with an empty shell. That’s exactly what Rush Poker did. It took away the psychology aspect and left people with a math-based shell that’s relatively easy to abuse within the confines of its own rules. No longer will skilled players be able to make use of their prowess, and skill will once again take a back seat to luck.

Some worry that Rush Poker, as attractive as it may be for beginners, might turn into a trap for them. Weaker players who can barely handle playing at two tables, are definitely not ready for Rush Poker, yet right now they’re over there jumping from one table to another by the thousands.

Since optimal Rush Poker strategy is extremely simple (think one of the simplest, most radical versions of ABC TAG poker), there’s another danger: once everyone catches on, the Rush Poker tables will turn into a hopeless give and take, and not even the best players will be able to wring any juice from them. What that would mean is that the only way to make any sort of money at Rush Poker would be through rakeback.

That takes us to another hidden pitfall that Rush Poker comes fitted with: the poker rake.

Players love the idea of logging as many as 2,500 hands per hour. It’s awesome: it takes the downtimes out of the game, it kills the boredom, and it takes the money out of your pockets through the rake at a never before seen rate. I bet you never considered that. The increased speed of the game will mean that the edges successful players will be able to exploit will get ever smaller, which in turn means that the poker rake will become a bigger and bigger enemy.

Whatever direction Rush Poker evolves in, in its current format, “playing the player instead of playing the cards” as advised by the pros, will be quite impossible.