A ton has already been said on the topic of the new Rush Poker format on Full Tilt, but it's still in it's early infancy, so it's hard to imagine that a whole lot has really been figured out. So far I can say that there is a lot that I really like about it.
There is, foremost, the sheer innovation of it. I mean, the format of poker has never been tinkered with so dramatically in my time playing the game. Whatever game you happened to be playing online, you could always imagine playing the same game live. But with Rush Poker, they've invented a variation of the game that couldn't be feasibly reproduced in a live setting. They've created their own truly original form of poker.
As far as play is concerned, they have basically reproduced everything that makes multi-tabling so attractive - high volume of hands and short downtime between hands - and added a few little benefits that are specific to the format - instant table selection at a guaranteed-to-be-full table.
So now the benefits of multi-tabling are available to all players, which leaves a critical question floating in the air - whither the single-tabling donks and their 80/10/1.0 stat lines? These are the guys that we multi-tablers have been feasting on for years - the ones who sit down and open up one table and, either out of boredom or cluelessness, play way too many bad hands and spew money as a result. It seems like it will be obvious enough, even to these guys, that it doesn't make sense for them to play all of those garbage hands anymore. Could they possibly still be producing 50+ VPIP numbers at the Rush tables? Of course there's a lot more to a donk than just poor PF hand selection...but it's certainly a big part of what makes them so exploitable. Will the end result be that the Rush games are tighter and tougher than the standard tables? Seems reasonable to think that they will be tighter, but whether they are tougher remains to be seen.
I started an analysis of my HEM statistics last week and then starting playing winning PLO again. I was inspired to do that analysis when I was slumping, and now all I want to do is play play play. But it would be foolish to ignore the value of such an analysis, so I am committing here to an ongoing look at my numbers and what they might mean. Sorry if it's a boring slog, but I plan to dump it out here for my own benefit as soon as I can gather it all together.
4 comments:
"...whither the single-tabling donks and their 80/10/1.0 stat lines? These are the guys that we multi-tablers have been feasting on for years - the ones who sit down and open up one table and, either out of boredom or cluelessness, play way too many bad hands and spew money as a result. It seems like it will be obvious enough, even to these guys, that it doesn't make sense for them to play all of those garbage hands anymore..."
Please Please PLEASE say it ain't so! This cannot be happening. I've been contemplating the same thing, and hopefully the drift toward the mean vpip doesn't actually happen. If that's the case, then poker has become a lot more marginal, as far as edges are concerned.
It's a valid point you make about the super fish possibly tightening up some, but I really think it will be somewhat offset by the ability to steal so much more flamboyantly. People will adjust because of their ability to plow through garbage until they get a huge hand, but I think the bad players will mostly over-compensate and stop defending in spots where they probably would/should.
That, and I've seen enough 10-4s type hands come out of the big blind at rush in the last few days to know that some fish will never learn.
It's kinda weird; I've been running like this: I'll swing wildly when I'm playing Rush. I'll be down $100 then up $200. Don't know if anyone else is experiencing these kinds of swings. However, when I drop over to the standard full ring tables, I'll kill 'em because I'm primed with reads, where whatever I just lost at the Rush tables I'll earn back & then some at the FR tables.
Meister, sounds pretty clear that you should be favoring the normal ring games if your edge is strongly read-dependent.
And Zachary, I agree that stealing becomes a more critical element of the Rush game at this early stage where everyone is so excited to just fold and move on to the next hand. And as people pick up on the value of stealing light from late position, restealing will become highly profitable. The Quickfold button is such a tempting thing - why sit around and wait to play your button with Q7o or some other garbage when you can just move on to the next hand? But in a normal ring game, this is a hand that you would probably be trying to steal with. So maybe the right adjustment is to start stealing from the CO and HJ more frequently...
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