Rush Strategy

I have been pwning Rush for pretty much all of my sessions recently...it's just so nice not too have to worry about table-selecting to avoid shorties and bad tables (although the recent move to raise the min buy-in makes this easier). And just not having to worry about tables breaking all the time, not having to keep track of 14 tables open at once...I've been able to 4-table Rush without too much of a problem, which puts me well over 1,000 hands/hour. Sick. Verneer had a pretty nice Rush poker video up on CardRunners if you're a CR member, I found it quite useful.

The change in the game is that you're essentially trying to play against a population-average player all the time, and other players are trying to do this too. You can't use a HUD and the game goes too fast to take notes if you're 4-tabling (more on this later). So unless you recognize somebody as a regular by their screenname, you just have to assume that they're some random donkey and play like the average player. They have to do the same thing for you (if you recognize somebody as a reg, chances are they recognize too, so usually you're either both unknown to each other or you both realize that you're regs).

In any case, I don't want to give away too many secrets...and Verneer covers them pretty well in his video, but here's a list of some things that average players at .5/1 don't do that often, that are wildly profitable to do vs. players who assume that their opponents don't do them very often:

1) 3-betting

2) In particular, 3-betting and squeezing early position raisers. Ranges are tighter for early position raisers than LP raisers and everyone realizes that. But most people don't realize that EP raising ranges aren't so tight that 3-betting isn't really profitable when you get folds from everything but QQ+, whereas when you 3-bet a button raiser you're getting a fold out of KQo and JTs pretty rarely these days.

3) Raising c-bets. Raising c-bets in position, deep, with two overs and a backdoor draw, for instance, is pure gold.

These are all strategies that should be employed in normal games too, but to a lesser extent, because opponents can adjust and start giving your raises less respect. But in Rush, they won't adjust unless 1) you do it so much that people start making notes on you, 2) you post on your blog that you'll be doing it, or 3) the entire pool of players starts doing these things, in which case you have to figure out how to adjust yourself and exploit players who are best responding to this new norm.

-BRUECHIPS