The Chip Stack Blog

The tournament coin-flip is one of the situations regular tournament players dread. It represents a point in the game when their skill no longer matters, one where Lady Luck takes over and decides whether to let one live or not. No good poker player likes the tournament coin-flip, regardless of how macho one tries to be about it. Mike McDonald (Timex)’s is an edifying example in this sense. The young poker genius decided to take a break from poker, on account of having grown disillusioned with the game. One of the reasons that he mentioned regarding his decision was that tournament poker had grown increasingly luck dependent because of the numerous coin-flips players were forced to take in the later stages. Coin-flips are indeed an integral part of poker tournaments. If you ever won a poker tournament in your life, looking back at it objectively, you’ll realize you’d most probably gotten away with more than a handful of such coin-flips.

By definition, a coin-flip is a 50-50 odds situation, in which the outcome is entirely dependent on luck, in the case of poker: on the board. An example of a poker coin-flip would be to have your Q,Q going up against an A,K. You already have a made hand but your opponent has six outs to beat you, which means the odds are by and large even. Knowing that, it is weird to talk about the use of strategy to better your coin-flip odds. Weirdly enough: it can be done too.

First of all, you need to make sure the coin-flip you’re about to take is a coin-flip indeed. While in poker the odds are rarely exactly 50-50 on coin-flips, a 45-55% match-up will still pretty much count as one. A 30-70% match-up not so much though. Just because you believe you’re about to get yourself into a coin-flip, doesn’t mean that you do too. If your 7,7 goes up against your opponent’s A,A, that there’s not much of a coin-flip. In order to know that you’re about to take a coin-flip for your tournament life, you need to need to have a solid read on the opponent you’re up against. All this has little to do with altering the odds involved though. For that, you’ll have to take the initiative in the hand. In other words: you need to be the aggressor. Being aggressive generally pays in poker. If you’re aggressive, you create a natural advantage over your opponents, and here’s how that advantage works in the case of the coin-flip: by making the shove instead of making the call, you’ll have your opponent faced with a critical decision. As they would say in NBA playoff terms: you defend home court and you place the pressure onto your opponent. He may decide the make the call, but he may decide to fold too. By being aggressive, you’ve basically opened up two ways to win the hand: by winning the coin-flip, or by forcing your opponent to fold.

Now put yourself in his shoes: the pressure’s on you, and you have to make the decision. If you decide to call, you will have to win the coin-flip, there are no other way for you to win the hand. The advantage that you secure by being the aggressor in the above described situation is known as the fold equity.

Sign up for rakeback when playing in online poker tournaments. Most of your rake rebate will come from cash games of course, but a rake return on tournament fees is also more than welcome anytime. Log on to http://www.rakemeback.com for the best rakeback and poker propping deals.

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Rush Poker strategy

A couple of months ago, Rush Poker’s introduction by Full Tilt caused some serious waves in the online poker industry. Some hailed the innovation as the biggest change poker had ever seen since going online, others were fast to write it off as a failed attempt to innovate, made at the expense of the very factors that make poker a game of skill rather than one of luck. I happen to agree with both points of view, but one has to admit that good or bad, successful or not so much (I suppose it is rather successful though), Rush Poker is here to stay. Due to the modifications made to some of the core concepts of the game, optimal strategy for the Rush Poker tables has changed quite a bit too.

First of all: let’s take a quick look at the changes brought about by Rush Poker. Spawned by an insatiable thirst for action on the part of the online poker player, Rush Poker is a game which managed to eliminate downtimes completely. Players who join the Rush Poker action do not actually join a given table. Rather, they join a room with thousands of players, who play at hundreds of different tables. Once a Rush Poker player folds his hand, he’s automatically taken to another table where he’s dealt into another hand immediately. The quick fold option allows players to tick the fold button and to be taken to another table, before the action gets around to them.

What this means is that you can toss your player reading skills right out the window. The very essence of the game, that based on psychology and on individual ability to pick up on various reads, has pretty much been done away with. You won’t stick around long enough at a table to develop a history with those playing there and thus to make any sort of reads. That leaves you with the mathematical side of the game: play good old ABC (tight aggressive) poker and hope for the best. That’s your best shot really and here’s why: at a regular table, most of the money you make comes from fish, who constantly make bad choices. Even if you manage to score a few lucky hands against your skilled peers, your profits will still come from the fish. At the Rush Poker table though, there’s no way you can tell who’s a fish and who’s not. The only way to make sure you milk the opportunities offered by the fish is to play radically tight-aggressive, ABC poker, kind of like back in the days at the micro limits.

Tightening up and raising your starting hand requirements makes sense from a whole bunch of angles. Because players won’t have to wait around for anything, they can just hit that quick-fold button 10 times in a row and play only the starting hand they like. This means you’ll need a really good starting hand to compete against those who decide to commit chips on the same hand on which you make the move.

Pay extra attention to the BB. The BB is the only position which doesn’t have the quick-fold option displayed from the get go. What that means is that the guy in the BB is most likely to attempt a defense on rags. None of the other players have any kind of motivation to venture into light three-bet territory at all.

Another major difference between regular poker and Rush Poker is linked to rakeback and the poker rake. Because Rush Poker is so dazzlingly fast, you’ll end up generating much more poker rake per hour than at any of the regular cash tables. That means it’s quite imperative that you sign up for a rakeback or a poker prop deal, otherwise you’ll end up bleeding away too much of your profits.

Steve Larson, an online poker player from Canada, visit his http://www.rakemeback.com web site for more useful information.

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