Rush Joker

The poker site I'm primarily playing on now seems to feel like they have the right to basically re-invent the game. I guess when you own the house you start feeling like God. Short of actually creating new games, they've tinkered endlessly with the adjustable parameters of poker in order to create games that appeal to every type of player. Short stacks for the aggressive. Deep stacks for the afraid. Matrices for the multi-tablers. Super short stacks for the gamblers. I would give them credit for being creative, but there still seems to be no sign of five-card draw anywhere on their site so the selection to me still feels... plentiful, but incomplete.

Their latest invention is Rush Poker. My first reaction was: "umm... hell no. That just seems... like a bad idea." I eventually gave it a try, but still have mixed feelings about it. It doesn't seem like something a player could make money from too easily. All that effort you put in over the years studying other players and learning how to pick up tells, worthless. Being at a new table every hand means that once you get a read on another player they're immediately taken away from you, lost into a pool of hundreds. You'll probably land at a table with them again, but not as often as you'd like.

Last night I played something like my seventh session on this, Howard Lederer's latest carnival ride of confusion. I felt good going into it because I was up on Rush poker about forty bucks thanks to a hand where I was AIPF three-ways holding AK vs KQ & 9h7h. I was all ready to fire up the internet browser and start blogging when somehow they whiffed. The hand I will share with you now is nearly identical to another hand from one of my first Rush sessions a few weeks ago (before I had this blog)




He took the lead the whole way until the turn when I figured out that I was good and raised. He called my raise, leaving me with something like $4 behind and $26 in the pot, so I think my call on the river was unavoidable. Maybe I could have pushed him off it on the turn with a bigger bet, but with such a small difference between a min-raise and a 3-bet, he probably still would have called. I wanted the action on the turn anyway so I guess I'm glad he chased the straight draw.