Quick, Fold!

Inasmuch as this is my first column for Card Player, I’d like to provide a little background on myself. I currently work for LeggoPoker.com as a coach and video producer. I’ve also written a poker book. I’ve been playing poker for about six years. I play mostly no-limit hold’em, with some pot-limit Omaha peppered into the mix. I enjoy the mental aspects of poker the most, which is what attracted me to the game that I now play professionally.

We all want it now. We want a premium hand now. We want the action now. We want to make the most money at the poker table now. What if waiting is the key to realizing our wants? Oddly enough, in Rush Poker, where the action is lightning-fast and the player is always in the trenches making decisions, patience has its strategic advantages. In order to understand how patience prevails, we first need to discuss why we are waiting, and what waiting in Rush Poker games has to do with something poker players call “metagame.”

A well-known colloquialism in the poker community, the term metagame refers to the way that past hands affect present and future hands against the same opponents. Even if you don’t like to admit it, perfect understanding of metagame is what separates the great players from the best players. Anyone who has passed an algebra class can do the math to solve most poker scenarios. Forming ranges that describe a player’s equity in a hand while taking into account his other thought processes, the metagame, is an often-debated topic among the best poker minds.

Metagame is difficult to quantify, because it’s a description of a psychological state. Psychological states are always subjective from an outside point of view. They are what make poker so dynamic and fun! While in a hand, every player’s reaction or emotional state of being is in flux. The idea of poker, beyond mastering the mathematics of fundamentals, is to stay one step ahead in this battle of perceptions. Consider a bet. The bet’s size is absolutely quantifiable, but it’s reason, combined with what other stimuli are available to us and to the bettor, is subjective to players other than the bettor. Range-based analysis at the poker table must be supported by mathematically based facts. In order to construct the logic-based figures that support a profitable play, discussing the metagame implications of several options at the poker table trains our minds to estimate those unquantifiable decisions. To hone the skills necessary to begin this analysis and to bring together accurate pieces of this puzzle, we must have a superb understanding of why people act the way that they do at the table.

In Rush Poker games, people constantly make decisions because they are always in a hand. Typically, these games form around a few hundred players who are transported from table to table based on when their hand is finished on their current table. The result is a near chaotic effect on one’s interpretation of metagame that exists within the constant decisions among the couple of hundred opponents one is facing. Any extensive history with another player is reduced to a quick passing of that player as you both bounce from one table to the next. Any information that could be seen at a showdown in which you are not participating is replaced by another preflop hand. I believe that if we examine Rush Poker’s mechanics and the typical motivations of a Rush Poker player in this seemingly chaotic environment, we may form a strategy that trumps the typical Rush Poker player’s strategy.

A unique feature of Rush Poker is the option to “quick fold” your hand. After you click the “quick fold” button once being dealt a hand, your hand is immediately folded. This fold is unknown to the other players at the table, as is the fact that you have moved to another table. At this other table, you immediately face another preflop decision. The option to fold your hand before seeing your opponents’ reactions to your fold creates a few interesting metagame dynamics that are specific to Rush Poker. Many players choose to replace marginal preflop decisions with a new hand on another table, and miss the ability to consider reraising preflop as a bluff. People love to replace worries with possibilities. The pain associated with a failed bluff is a negative feeling that’s reinforced in the mind, whereas being dealt pocket aces is a good feeling that is reinforced in the mind. The possibility of experiencing such a strong good feeling often outweighs the probability of a negative feeling, especially if the latter is easily avoidable.

In Rush Poker, the allure of the unknown negates edges that most players could have on their competition. For example, at the typical Rush Poker table, if I know that if I raise from under the gun, my opponents will assume that my range is strong and will “quick fold” all of their marginal hands, like K-J offsuit, I should have a wider under-the-gun opening range, as I stand to win the blinds more often than at non-Rush Poker tables. The corollary to this idea is that if Rush Poker players realize that opening with wider ranges means that they should win the blinds more often, there are extremely profitable opportunities to play back at preflop open-raises with a high rate of success, due to how much more often these opens are made with hands that cannot stand a reraise.

Consider what poker-training websites have been saying for years: Opponents who play several tables are often preoccupied with other decisions, and are vulnerable to aggressive plays because their interest in the outcome of that particular situation is outweighed by keeping up with other decisions on other tables. By not “quick folding” marginal hands in Rush Poker, we effectively are playing only a few tables against multitabling opponents who ignore the situations deemed marginal in order to play best in obviously profitable situations. When one has an abundance of choices to make, only the most profitable make the cut and the rest are “quick folded,” abandoned as marginal time-wasters. Because so many poker decisions are marginal in situations without any information on an opponent, it’s easy to see many profitable bluffing opportunities become available in Rush Poker.

There is a reason why, during a training video I made in which I played 100 percent of my hands on two tables of Rush Poker, I made money. My constant preflop reraising and exploitation of what I thought to be a common strategic approach to playing in Rush Poker games more than buffered the few times that I ran into a big hand or a stubborn opponent. Without the metagame implications of reraising a particular player too often, having the entire table see that I was reraising other players, or having the other players at the same table as me at the time of my reraise, I ran over my tables. I reraised different opponents without them knowing that I had reraised the previous 10 hands. If a player’s opening range consists of hands that he will fold around 80 percent of the time, it’s easy to see how much money one might make simply by reraising often preflop.

There is a simple adjustment to be made to beat the current Rush Poker games that any algebra student can figure out. Sometimes, finding that profitable play is going to come by taking the accepted thought process a step (or more) further. So, how do we get it now? Quick, raise! ♠

See videos made by Reid Young and check out his book by looking up SHOOTAA at LeggoPoker.com.