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Tools For Beating Rush Poker

There’s a glut of Rush Poker strategy floating around, some of it good, some of it terrible. Rather than joining that fray (yet, anyway), we decided to take a slightly different track and talk about how to to create the best environment for playing Rush Poker.

If you’re not familiar, Rush Poker is a new poker variant rolled out by Full Tilt Poker earlier this year. The rules of the game aren’t any different – just the speed. Unlike turbo tables, which force the action by giving everyone less time to act, Rush Poker picks you up and drops you into a new hand the second you fold your first one.

For a more detailed explanation on how Rush Poker works, check out this article.

Anyhow, this isn’t an article about how Rush Poker works. It’s an article about the tools you can use to improve your win rate at Rush Poker. We’re going to talk about three tools – a heads-up display, TableNinja and the humble Notepad application – that, when used correctly, can give you a significant edge over the casual player.

Rush Poker Tool One: Heads Up Display

A heads-up-display (HUD) is a pretty standard tool for online poker players. A HUD takes data about your opponents drawn from hand histories out of a database program such as Holdem Manager or PokerTracker and displays it next to your opponents on the table window. A HUD updates in real time (assuming you have HEM or PT running), so as you collect more hands on your opponents, you get more data regarding their tendencies.

HUDs are great in regular games, but they are indispensable in Rush Poker. When you’re moving rapidly from one table to the next, it’s impossible to form reads on opponents and, even if you could, it’s difficult to remember opponents (a problem exaggerated by Full Tilt Poker’s stock avatar selection). The speed of the game makes it tough to take deep notes on your opponents, further compromising your ability to react in opponent-specific ways.

Both Holdem Manager and PokerTracker support Rush Poker, and do a great job of popping up your data for the opponents at your new table within seconds of your arrival – more than sufficient time for you to access your stored data and get a sense of whether the three-bet from the button is a premium hand or an aggressive player trying to abuse their position.

Below is a video that walks through some of the features of the PT HUD for Rush Poker; HEM’s HUD offers a very similar set of features.

Get more info about PokerTracker and Holdem Manager in our comparison report here.

Rush Poker Tool Two: TableNinja

We’re huge TableNinja fans. The program makes multi-tabling a breeze by allowing you to assign keyboard shortcuts to all of your on-screen actions (bet, raise, fold, sit out, switch tables, etc), saving you the hassle of dragging a mouse over multiple monitors and tables. As if Rush Poker wasn’t fast enough, TableNinja presses down on the accelerator a bit more, ramping the speed of the game into virtually super-sonic territory.

The single biggest asset: TableNinja allows you to assign a shortcut to the ‘quick fold’ action, the one that immediately moves you on to your next hand as soon as you can possibly fold. The difference between using the ‘quick fold’ and the traditional fold buttons hasn’t been quantified, to the best of our knowledge, but my rough guess would that it increases your hands per hour by at least 75%.

Using this shortcut on just one table is nice; using it on multiple tables of Rush Poker allows you to get some serious sick hands per hour totals, without diminishing the quality of your play by any significant amount. In fact, TableNinja arguably increases the quality of your play – with bet sizing shortcuts and single keystrokes for betting, raising and folding, your attention isn’t split between shipping the mouse to a particular button on a particular window and making a critical decision in another window. TN allows you to minimize the distractions and hassles, and maximize your focus on the decision-making process.

For more info on the program, read our review of Table Ninja here.

Download TN for FTP here.

Rush Poker Tool Three: Notepad

Poker players love Notepad. Rush Poker players should love it even more, as it’s the only reasonable way to take notes on opponents within the context of Rush Poker’s blazing speed. Here’s the problem: you generally take a note on a person as the hand ends. However, when playing Rush Poker, the end of one hands means the start of another, which means a move to a new table with a new set of opponents. So, how do you take notes?

Here, your HUD comes in handy yet again. While you may move tables instantly, your HUD takes a second or two to catch up. That means you’ll still be able to click on an opponent’s name and take a note on them that will be stored within PokerTracker or HEM and available the next time you face that player.

Second problem: The game moves so fast that even if you get the box up, you have precious little time to write. That’s where notepad comes into the picture. Rush Poker is a version of poker that lacks some of the meta-aspects of a typical poker game. I don’t want to say it’s a simpler game, but in some ways it is – specifically, you need to know (and can know) less about your opponents that you would if you played several hundred hands in a row against them. The upside: there are only so many notes you’re going to be making on opponents, so you can easily create a stock list of notes (‘will go broke with overpair on any flop’; ‘check-raises turn when strong’) and put those notes in a notepad file, one per line, organized however you like.

When you need to take a note, flip over to Notepad, quickly grab the relevant note, copy it and paste it into the box. Presto- what would have been a frustrating process that could potentially sap your focus or spark a tilt episode is now a 4-click affair that will pay serious dividends in future play.

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