More Hands, More Action: Welcome to Rush Poker

There have been several innovations in online poker, but few have taken the poker community by storm in the same manner as Full Tilt Poker’s latest offering, Rush Poker. Considered by some as the best thing to happen to the game since poker made its way online, Rush Poker is being touted as a grinder’s paradise that offers players a different way to play poker. Even the game’s elite have become fans of the new format, including poker’s top player Phil Ivey, who thinks Rush Poker is the biggest thing to happen to online poker since sit-and-gos were introduced. “It’s more hands. It is more action. Why wouldn’t you want to play Rush Poker,” said the game’s most feared player.

Designed to provide players with the ultimate gaming platform, Rush Poker breaks down traditional play to the purest form of the game while offering fast-paced action that keeps a player making decisions every few seconds. This innovative playing platform has found fans ranging from professional players to novices who are getting their feet wet for the first time. According to Team Full Tilt member Andy Bloch, Rush Poker is a new way to experience the game.

“It really changes poker and takes it to the next level. Regular poker is kind of like watching television before having VCRs. Rush Poker is like watching television with a TiVo. It’s like football games. They have between 10 and 15 minutes of real action. Imagine if someone watched the game for you, then selected all of the action plays so that you could watch them without having to watch the rest of the other stuff. That’s what Rush Poker is. All you see is action, and you are always making decisions. There is no time for anything in between,” Bloch said.

In case you are unfamiliar with the Rush Poker format, it is similar to no-limit hold’em in many ways except for a few unique features that dramatically increase the number of hands a player sees per hour. In traditional online cash-game play, a player has to play three tables to see the same number of hands as a Rush Poker player who’s playing a single table. In addition, players are moved from table to table with every new hand, so there is very little opportunity to get caught up in traditional poker concepts like profiling players and maintaining a table image. In other words, players can easily see 300 hands per hour while concentrating on the purest part of the game, playing each hand based on the appropriate strategy required.

For players looking for new challenges, Rush Poker offers a different style of game that forces players to adjust on the fly. “You have to play your hands well. It’s not about setting people up and doing things like that. This is a great format to simply play your hand the way it should be played and move on to the next hand. For someone working on the fundamentals of the game, this is a great format,” Team Full Tilt member Howard Lederer said.

Although Bloch and Lederer applaud the speed of the game and the new format, there are other reasons why Rush Poker sets the standard for new forms of poker. The first reason is the shift in players’ tracking opportunities. Because a player changes tables with every hand, keeping track of what players did in previous hands is much more difficult. According to the pros, this works to the advantage of both skilled players and people who are new to the game, because players can change their styles with each hand.

“I think the tight players are the ones who are doing well right now, but I think a whole mix of styles can find success. I have tried playing different ways, like playing every hand to playing only the ‘Sklansky Tier One’ hands, or playing only pocket pairs. I’ve found success with all three, so I think it is really up to the players to find which style they feel the most comfortable with,” said Team Full Tilt member Phil Gordon.

Bloch seconds the theory that Rush Poker gives players an advantage thanks to the constant switching of tables, because the format offers constant opportunities to take advantage of a situation without worrying about giving off tells or other information that might put a player in a weak position. “When you can play without worrying about your image, you can focus on making the play that will make you the most money in that hand,” Bloch said.

Another reason why Rush Poker found a warm welcome among the poker community, including several poker forums that traditionally crucify new poker ventures, lies in the format’s ability to teach players the game in a manner that dramatically accelerates their learning curve. “It’s a great training ground for people looking to develop their basic no-limit hold’em skills. You put a lot of hands in without having to worry about things like catching people steaming or picking up on betting patterns. It is more about, ‘OK, I’ve got ace-jack and I’m in first position. How should I play this hand?’ These are the marginal hands that poker players need to learn how to play if they want to be successful. Once you learn the way to play those hands, you can explore different lines within those situations and try them out multiple times in a short period,” Lederer said.

Bloch takes it a step further, suggesting that players can experiment in ways that would otherwise be impossible in a traditional cash-game setting. “Players have the opportunity to explore different strategies with every hand while not risking their opponents figuring out what they are doing. This means you can learn and try something new with every hand you play. If you are in a regular cash game and you raise from under the gun most of the time, people are going to realize what you are doing pretty quickly. This means you won’t be able to raise from under the gun after a while, because people won’t value your hand. You’re going to get re-popped and you won’t get any respect. You then have to change your game. With Rush Poker, even if you raise every single time, it is going to take a long time before people catch on to what you are doing.”

A third reason Rush Poker has found a growing list of enthusiasts has to do with the commitment by the people responsible for making Rush Poker a reality. Conceptualized two years ago, Rush Poker finally became a reality in the fourth quarter of 2009. According to Lederer, some initial trepidation gave way to an unbridled enthusiasm that spread across the various divisions within the Tilt family and played a role in the development of the format.

“I loved the concept of not having to wait as a player. But I also wondered if it was really true to traditional poker. I think it is. It is just a different form of the game. We assumed that most people would like Rush, but that wasn’t the point. We’ve always succeeded in developing software that has every ‘must-have’ feature possible, but we also want to offer features that are new and innovative. Not everyone is going to care about it, but we knew a good portion of the poker community would like it. Once we had a working prototype, we knew it would find an audience that would love this kind of game,” he said.

Once the Tilt team decided to run with the Rush feature, the effort built momentum in many of the groups being driven by poker-playing staff members and the feedback the site received prior to Rush’s development. Even the Team Full Tilt pros got involved in the development process, which led to heated discussions about how to proceed with the platform’s development. “We worked hard to ensure the integrity of the game, so it was a complicated project with a big scope,” Lederer said.

Gordon has also weighed in on how to proceed with the software development. “I consulted with engineering about different ways to implement the software. It was important for us to make sure that you could never tell when someone had folded, by making it impossible to monitor the tables. That was one of the big keys to making it work,” he said.

Full Tilt’s collective effort appears to be paying off in spades. The format is attracting all kinds of players, from guppies out for their first swims in the treacherous poker waters to the sharks who hover while waiting to dine on the fresh meals on the virtual felt. According to Bloch, Rush Poker lets skilled players take advantage of technology that was previously unavailable unless they had a big bankroll.

“Take someone who is capable of multitabling [playing multiple tables simultaneously] a bunch of tables. Now he can multitable Rush Poker. Players who can do this get so many more hands in per hour. Playing four Rush tables is like playing 12 regular tables at once. Most players don’t have enough monitors to play 12 tables at once without overlapping multiple tables, so the ability to play four Rush tables on a small screen definitely makes it easier for people to play at this level. When I’m traveling, I can play four Rush tables with no overlap on my small laptop. This is a big advantage for someone who is a casual player or someone playing on a small screen. Instead of having to have multiple monitors to play, you can get the same action on a laptop,” he said.

According to Gordon, the software’s playability is a major reason the online organization proceeded with the new venture despite initial concerns that it might not find an audience. “Having people dislike what you are doing is always a risk, but you can’t sit on your laurels when you have an idea as good as this. You pretty much have to go for it and see what comes up. Hopefully, your engineering team will get it right and the players will respond. I think the Full Tilt engineering team did a great job.”

One facet of Rush Poker that is unanimously cited as the primary key to the format’s success is the speed of action. “If someone wants to jump on the site and get his poker fix in a short amount of time, he is going to log in to Rush Poker. If you’ve got 15 minutes and you want to play some poker, you can get 50 hands in 15 minutes at a single table. You can’t do that in any other form of poker. In regular online play, you might get in eight hands. In live play, you might get dealt just five hands; fewer if you are unlucky. With Rush Poker, you can expect to have every range of hand in one hour. You can expect to have aces once an hour, and that is a great feeling, because when people sit down to feel the rush of poker, they want to wake up with pocket aces,” Bloch said.

For Gordon and other players like him, Rush Poker offers a way to feed his inner action-junkie. “When you are playing poker online, it’s already fast in comparison to a live game. Rush takes the speed factor and triples it. It’s lightning-fast, and you are always making a decision. That’s what makes it so amazing. Keep in mind that the more hands you play, the larger the swings are going to be, because you are seeing so many more hands. With Rush Poker, the action doesn’t stop until you want it to.”

Bloch sums up Rush Poker’s biggest key to success the best by comparing the game’s speed and constantly flowing action to the experience of driving a finely tuned automobile. “Regular poker is like being stuck in stop-and-go traffic. In Rush, you’re driving on a nice smooth highway, and although there are bends and turns in the road, you are never stuck at a traffic light or in a traffic jam.”