Fast Fold Poker Basics

Fast Fold Poker began with Full Tilt Poker's launching of Rush Poker. Now, many sites have released their own variant of a fast-moving ring game (see right).

Unlike regular ring games, players in Fast Fold games are entered into a player pool of hundreds rather than sat at one unique table.

After you have finished playing one hand - whether you have gone to showdown or folded - you are instantly sat at a new table with new opponents. You can even fold out of turn - if you don't like your hand, you can fold even before the players in front of you have acted, being dealt a new hand with new players instantly.

This means a faster game and - hopefully - a larger hourly rate for regular players. To help you adjust your game to this exciting new format, we've prepared a guide for you.

Fast Fold versus regular poker

As you are playing against new opponents in every hand, utilising your reads on players is less of a factor when making a decision in a hand.

You should now no longer feel the need to play marginal hands. You can fast fold the weak and marginal hands and get more premium hands per hour. The game becomes tighter as recreational players are more inclined to fold their hands and even better players make less loose steals from late positions.

Fast Fold poker: tips for beginners

Pay attention to your position. In contrast to the regular tables, the positions no longer rotate in succession but are set randomly during each hand. This makes the determining of your own position somewhat more complicated. You therefore need to pay particular attention to your position and only play the correct hands based upon the starting hand charts.

One table at a time. Due to the high speed, multiple tables will result in too many expensive mistakes. We advise against playing more than one table if you are just starting out with this poker variant. Once you feel comfortable playing one table, you can of course add a second and build up from there.

Leave the table with over 150BBs. Don't get in too deep - playing with a big stack requires a special understanding of the game and advanced knowledge. If you are unsure how to play with a big stack, leave the table and re-join it. That way you can play with 100BB as usual with nearly no delay.

Further beginner strategy links:

Strategy: How to Play Before the Flop?

Psychology: How can you Protect your Money from Tilt?

Psychology: Tilt - Introduction (Silver+)

Strategy: How to Play Deep Stacked (Silver+)

Fast Fold poker: tips for advanced players

As mentioned above, Fast Fold games typically play tighter and more straightforwardly than regular games. Therefore an advanced player has extra room to open up their game and gain an edge on their by-the-book opponents.

Loose steals in late position are often successful. Opponents will regularly "Fast Fold" from the cut off, button and small blind, meaning that small raises from later positions will be more successful. Remember - the smaller our raise, the less successful it has to be to show a profit.

Light 3-bets can be profitable. Whilst in regular games, players may decide to defend 3-bets with marginal hands, in Fast Fold games the trend is to just fold a close spot and move on to the next hand. This means that 3-bets against late position steals will often be more successful.

Balanced ranges are less important. Playing against different opponents every hand also means that people won't be thinking about game flow. We can now raise 20 pots in a row and nobody will label us as a bully.

Fast Fold poker: countering the regs

Especially at stakes of NL100 and higher, you will find strong players from higher stakes playing Fast Fold games. It is likely that they will make the above adjustments automatically. To counter this, you have the following re-adjustments:

Make use of positional stats. Players generally play the same style all the time: some might open a lot from UTG, others steal close to 100% of their buttons, others might 3-bet a lot from the blinds. While their average statistics might look standard, variations in their positional stats can be very extreme. Picking up on these tendencies and playing against them can earn you a lot of money.

4-bet light. Everyone knows that good players steal a lot from the button, so as a default they 3-bet a lot more from the blinds. Don't be afraid to 4-bet bluff! The size can even be kept small, as your opponent will often be too scared to put in a light 5-bet and simply fold. They also don't like to call and play the hand out of position, so most of the time you'll pick up the pot there and then.