April 14, 2011

Thoughts on Rush Poker and My Pokerstars Microstakes Bankroll Project

I have been experimenting with various different games in the last few months, and one of these has been Full Tilt’s Rush Poker. One of the appeals to me is that you don’t need to bother with table selection, seat position, table breakups, and the main one, hands per hour is almost four times that of normal tables.

I started with 6 max, and I have to say that over 20k hands I just couldn’t get comfortable with it. I don’t know what it was, but I seemed to be getting raised off every flop, and whenever I shoved, I was crushed. I ran 5bi below equity over the small sample, which didn’t help, but I still never felt I had the control in many pots. There was tons of 5bet shoving in levelling wars with garbage like 89s in the bb versus the sb, for example. It felt far more aggressive than normal 6max, and I struggled with the lack of time to make decisions. I fired up some normal speed tables at same stakes, and I realised that was the problem. 6max is all about hand reading and selective aggression, bluffing is a big part of the game. I’m happy to accept I cannot do that without more time/reads/history to consider.

So I’m trying full ring. Here it’s a value-based game, where a more ABC style is fine, extracting the most from your strong hands and giving up more on your weaker ones, which means I don’t have to beat myself up about not being aggressive enough etc.

Turning now to Pokerstars, I am having a great time at the micro micros, trying to build up a bankroll there from $20, see my previous post on this here. I am just about to go up to $25nl as I am up to $700. I just stack 6 tables on my tiny laptop when I fancy a game.

Observations? $5nl is so straightforward I don’t think there is much to say, I played a very loose style, double barrelling a lot and seemingly picking up a ton of folds. I only ever 3 bet for value.
$10nl starts to see a bit of knowledgeable players, scattered between recreational and maniac players, who are either ubernits or aggro donks and its easy to adjust accordingly. Here a bit more selective agression, and try to avoid coin flips.

So I will keep going with it till I get to $50nl and then decide what I want to do, as I will then have decent bank rolls at both tilt and stars, and be able to make a judgement on which is the better site to play small stakes games 50nl up to 100nl.

Heres the graph so far, which is missing about the first 5k or so.