CARDRUNNERS

What's Your Edge

tilllttt's Poker Blog

January 27, 2010

now that rush has calmed down a bit and people have started playing more sane, my basic assessment is that it's still profitable, but not sure that it's more profitable than playing 6-9 tables at six max if you do any kind of table selecting. clearly your biggest edge playing poker is identifying weaker players and exploiting their mistakes. readless, you can still identify weaker players on rush, but you will never really have that good of a read on their postflop tendencies, so in general, you are playing against a pool of weaker players and it will lead to some higher variance situations.

i think the biggest advantage to playing rush is when you are 200bb+ deep. fish and even a lot of regs do not play well when they are deep, and when you are deep you have a lot more weapons in the arsenal to determine villian's hand strength via post flop play. for 100bb people can really splash around and just sort of go with draws or whatever. when you are deep there is far more skill and hand reading involved. also, fish and regs still overplay overpairs when you are deep, and because of the nature of the game being very aggressive no one ever believes you have a hand anyway, so you generally get paid off when you have a monster. i almost won a 1000bb pot the other day. i raise utg with jj and villian 3b out of sb. i call since i am 500bb deep and he has me covered. flop comes j97sss. villian cbets and i raise about 3x and villian calls. turn is red 2 and villian check calls a 80% psb. river is another jack and villian checks. i shove for about 75% pot and villian tanks and times out folding. it's not often that you pick up 200bb without showdown.

what is amazing to me is that villian even thought about calling river when he obviously had aa and beat nothing. no one wants to get bluffed when you have a big pair vs an unknown, so that's the only reason he considered calling. if you play well deep then that is the biggest edge you will have in these games.

im not saying the games aren't profitable at 100bb. i'm just saying your edge will be greater vs relative unknowns when you are deep as opposed to 100bb when you have no idea of how villian plays postflop. i thought i would eventually start being able to develop some reads on regs, and after playing 15k hands or so i'm pretty sure this will not be possible, because even if you developed some kind of read on a reg, absent any history at the table, your read is going to be more generalized anyway.

rakeback will be better, but variance will be higher and i think it's more stressful. maybe i just need to get better at it, but those are my initial impressions.

i think it's actually far more profitable to play 6-9 tables of normal six max where you can develop specific reads and utilize a hud. rush has actually helped me pay more attention to some smaller details which help me develop reads quicker when i'm just playing regular tables, so it has actually helped me improve some things a bit.

anyway, i'm having a great month despite playing a ton of hands at 50nl and am finally getting my rolls on each site i play to the level where i will feel more comfortable playing higher. it's funny because i think when i check my ego at the door before playing my results are always so much better. as soon as ego creeps into my game then i start making mistakes. i thought i would be ashamed to play 50nl, and nothing could be further from the truth. it allowed me to open up my game and really work on some leaks vs weaker competition. it also helped build confidence which is something i was struggling with after a long break even stretch. i'm really looking forward to getting back into some 1/2 games because it has been a while since i've done anything at that limit and i feel like i have something to prove to myself. i'm getting very close to my bankroll requirements and since i won't need to cash out for a while after getting my tax return i'm pretty sure my time is coming soon.

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Jan 27, 10 13:25:58

Nice post.

Przytula