[Al Schoonmaker]

"Playing the rush" is almost the same as "pressing" when the dice are hot, but there is one important difference. The dice and cards cannot be affected by what happened before this hand or roll, but the other players' reactions are immensely affected. Everybody, even super-skeptics like me, is afraid of being run over by a steam-roller. That's why Doyle Brunson says he plays the rush, that huge intimidation factor.
As Sklansky and others have repeatedly argued, all that the runs of dice or cards can tell you is what has already happened. They have no memory and no predictive value.
The fact that all of us get rushes is simply a statistical fact. I once won 5 hands in a row, and I would have won the sixth if I hadn't wimped out and folded on the flop. Since the table was full, that's ten to the fifth power, about 100,000 to one, or ten to the sixth power, about 1,000,000 to one. By chance, I won every hand at a showdown, but I probably could have bluffed on the seventh hand. It was great fun, but it means nothing at all.
Let's take craps because it is easier to track the data. Craps players are extremely oriented toward hot and cold dice. Yet there are studies that point out that the chances of a pass are exactly the same after five passes as they are after someone has sevened out. I don't mean the theoretical chances. I mean the actual observed occurrences. Many casinos know exactly what number hits on a roulette wheel. They want to make sure the wheel is balanced and fair because otherwise they will get killed. They have tracked tens of millions of spins, and the results say that all the numbers show up exactly as we would expect, regardless of what has happened immediately beforehand. That is, a casino could easily track how often red comes up after it has already come up five times. The answer is slightly less than 50% of the time.
Exactly the same principle applies to our game. My chances of having the best cards are exactly the same no matter what has happened recently. However, my chances of winning without the best hand go up enormously when I'm playing the rush aggressively.
Al