but it is turn based, and like you mention a second or 2 isn’t a huge deal so I may go with just push to start

There's good documentation for Apollo Link and split points here: https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-link/blob/master/docs/implementation.md#split-points

There's an example of a Link function right below. Basically, you would create a function that sets up the push notification handler, and calls observer.next(data) with the push notification payload