Tinkering with the formula

I'm finally starting to use Hold'em Manager for things other than making pretty graphs. I've been running analyses on my Rush Poker hands looking for ways to squeeze more EV out of the hands that I'm playing and the first thing that has become clear is that blind stealing is a way of life in Rush. It is very rare to get a walk in the BB mostly because you will almost always get someone betting from the cutoff, button, or SB in an attempt to steal blinds since it is so easy for Rush players to auto-fold and move on to the next hand, a condition that does not exist in the same way at standard tables. So after a few sessions of mixing that into my game I ran a filter on my Rush play and it indeed is definitely profitable to steal blinds. Of course you get played back at by people who know you are stealing and by people with real hands but that doesn't diminish the fact that you're better off doing it than not doing it. At first made pot sized bets then I got a little greedy and tried doing min-bets to save money when I got raised but then I got played back at more often or had to see flops then fold so I'm back to making pot sized bets to steal. If you're going to steal you have to make it believable. Even though it's obvious that you're just trying to steal people still have to have a reasonable hand to call with. Long live the gap concept. One thing I like about blind stealing is that it is super-low variance since a pot sized can only cost me .17 maximum and taking down the blinds pre-flop is rake free which makes blind stealing sugar just that much sweeter. The real beauty of stealing in Rush is that you get new opponents every hand so it is very difficult for people to pick up on the fact that you are stealing at every opportunity. I also started raising with my second tier pairs from EP/MP after running my JJ or QQ into AA/KK too often but that resulted in folds so I figured, hey, if this works for good pairs then I can do it with ATC so I started steal attempts whenever I was first to the pot. I mean, who would figure that I'm going to try to steal blinds from UTG+1? I must have a real hand, right? Well, yes and no. It does work to steal but there is just too much territory to get through since anyone in between can wake up with cards and HEM bears that out. It is not EV+ enough to try omni-stealing so I'm throttling back to just LP steals.

Now I treat Rush as though I'm in the late stages of a tournament, I want to steal blinds often enough to not get "blinded out" so I pick my spots a little more carefully and just try to maintain my starting stack until I get a premium pair to go to war with. If all goes well I can just tread water with blind steals until I can get involved in hands with huge equity. So that is the strategy for now. I'm about 16,300 hands into NLHE Rush with only part of that incorporating the latest formula so the jury is still out but I feel that it is definitely rooted in a solid foundation. We'll know more after I grind through more hands.