Poker theoreticians and PokerTracker/Hold'emManager users will definitely want to stop by Outflopped.com and pick up ~70 gigabytes (GB) of online poker hand histories covering Absolute Poker, Full Tilt, IPN, ONG, PokerStars, and Party.

While you're there, do yourself and the rest of the poker community a favor and sign up for an account. Powered by the same StackExchange engine that powers the (okay, arguably) most popular programmer Q&A site in the world, Outflopped.com is organized poker Q&A.

If that sounds like a sales pitch, it is. I'm not affiliated with Outflopped.com in any way, shape, or form; but I do have an ulterior (and selfish) motive here. I want Outflopped.com to succeed because I ask and answer dozens of poker-related questions a month, and Outflopped provides a formal and user-friendly mechanism for airing and resolving poker-related questions in a way that makes them easy to ask, easy to answer, easy to search for, and easy to link to. It's a resource I want, and it's a resource you should want.

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Today, a quickie about how to push online poker game-and-player updates to your iPhone.

So as you know, these days you can send almost any piece of information to your cellphone. People have been texting themselves sports results and stock notifications for years. Now that technologies like SMS and iPhone push are commonplace, it's easy to toss a piece of information across the spatial boundary between the world and your cellphone, and it's pretty easy to do it in an automated way.

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Last week Full Tilt released Rush Poker, a new "hands-on-demand" online poker concept that enables the fastest games of poker the world has seen. From the Full Tilt website:

Warning: Rush Poker is extremely fast paced – prepare yourself for the most intense poker action in the world!

Available exclusively at Full Tilt Poker, Rush Poker is the ultimate high-speed poker experience.

This new poker format is designed to minimize your wait time between hands and keep you in the action. You’ll join a large player pool and face a different table of opponents every hand you play. When you fold your hand, you’ll be rushed to another table for a new hand right away.

To play even faster, use the Quick Fold button to move to a new table for the next hand immediately.

By dealing you a new hand at a new table every time you fold—instead of forcing you to wait on your opponents—Rush Poker creates a frictionless poker game that can deliver speeds of up to 600 hands per hour at a single table. Yet despite its name, Rush Poker doesn't actually feel rushed. Like driving a well-built car, you just cruise along, unconscious of your speed until you glance down at the speedometer.

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I don't normally cover poker news and events here on Coding the Wheel, but a quick congratulations to our old friend Bobby "Shooter" Hempkins of Dallas, Texas, who recently logged a $710,000 win at the WinStar casino River Poker Championship in Thackerville, Oklahoma. Via Pokerati:

WinStar reportedly threw in a $580,000 overlay to make their $3 million guarantee. Not sure about the buy-in details — I think they upped it to $2k? — nor overall results. The best “coverage” has come via 2+2 here, mixed in with some Facebook, Twitter, and direct txt msg buzz. (Thanks KevMath and Harris, as always, for the info!)

1,210 players overall.

The winner: Bobby Hempkins, aka “Shooter” in the Dallas poker boom days. (And now your source for residential real estate in the North Texas area.) $710k win. Nice!

I've long considered Shooter to be one of the strongest players in Dallas, as well as a true class act; one of the coolest, downright friendliest people I've ever come across in a card room. It was over two years ago that I said in an email to another player out of Dallas:

If I were a poker executive with millions of dollars of funding at my disposal, I would absolutely sponsor Shooter on the basis of his personality alone. He'd be a welcome refrain from some of the current crop of wannabe-cool loudmouth braggarts who dominate the televised poker circuit.

I could tell you half a dozen great Shooter stories in that vein, but a lot of these took place in private games, so I'll hold off. Still, it's nice to see some of those juicy WinStar funds flowing back across state lines to the Texas players without whom WinStar would never have been built.

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The other day we talked about how opponent color-coding can dramatically improve your online poker ROI because it addresses one of the most important and yet under-appreciated skills in poker:

Table selection, table selection, table selection

My opinion is that table selection is the single biggest factor influencing online poker results at any level.

All you have to do is read something like Table Selection and Variance 101 (by well-known 6-man SNG player Jared "jhub3000" Hubbard) to get a feel for the effort top players devote to table selection.

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