 Rush Poker is here, and it’s booming. Players of all kinds—regulars, donks, and casual
players alike—are haunting the tables day and night. You can’t pay some of these guys to stop playing Rush. It’s just that much fun.
Most of the game’s success is a due to its unique gameplay features. After all, it’s not an entirely new form of poker. It’s largely the same poker game we’ve all known and loved for centuries. It’s not like Full Tilt poker is reinventing cards, here. They’ve simply changed the dynamic a bit.
There are three main changes that make Rush Poker different from any other kind of poker: random seating, quick fold, and multi-tabling.
Random Seating
You don’t join a table in Rush Poker. You join a “game”, which is a big pool of players. Who’s in the pool is out of your control. You can’t table select or chase fish around. The only real information you’ll have about the pool is its size.
These pools exist so that Rush Poker can assign random seating. As you might already know, every hand you play in Rush will be against totally random opponents. This means you won’t be able to get long-term reads on players. It also means that nobody will have reads on you.
Playing against random people every hand is really quite liberating. You don’t have to worry about stat-heads trying to exploit your every move. You don’t have to worry about balancing your range or varying your play. You get to ditch the trickster stuff, and just enjoy a game of cards.
Random seating eliminates most of the metagame from poker. This can be fun for some and a pain for others. For the casual player and the grinder, it’s almost a godsent.
Rush Poker lets you play your cards based on their value. No more worrying about what X_p0kerGod_X (preflop raise %: 34.5, VPIP: 40, SBR: 83, AGF/RE3: 22) saw you do 3 hands ago in the SB.
Quick Fold
This is a big one. Quick fold is essentially a fold button on mescaline. Rumor has it that a programmer at Full Tilt deleted a couple lines of code by mistake, and alas—quick fold. But that’s all heresy. In any case, it’s a pretty awesome feature.
If you’re tired of waiting for your turn to act, quick fold is for you. Feed your inner child with the ability to ditch hands even before it’s your rightful turn. If it speeds up your game, why not?
If you’re dealt a hand you don’t like (and you’re NOT in the Big Blind) you can press quick fold, and ditch them immediately. Then you’ll be removed from the table without even having to watch the rest of the hand. You’ll be reseated at a new table against new opponents. New cards are only moments from there.
Quick fold is a game-changer, or at least it should be. Theoretically it makes playing crappy hands absolutely inexcusable. After all, a new deal is just seconds away. All it takes is a click of the quick, and you’re dealt anew.
However its real effect on the game is still to be seen. I know how poker players work, and we’re all fundamentally lazy. I have a sneaking suspicion that quick fold might just encourage robotic play, and put people on tilt faster when they lose their hands (“Damnit, I waited 20 quick folds for that AK!”).
If you use it well, quick fold will both make the game easier to tolerate and increase your hourly rate. If you don’t use it well, it has the potential to facilitate your losing a bankroll very quickly. However you decide to use it, it’s a damn cool feature.
Multi-Tabling
Multi-tabling isn’t exactly new, but Rush Poker does it in a new way. For one, you can’t play 24 tables of rush. Only 4 at a time. Further, you don’t join a totally separate game to multi-table in Rush. You join the same game multiple times.
It’s not like anyone would ever by any stretch of the imagination be able to handle 24 tables of rush at a time, so nothing lost there. Playing 4 tables at a time, you’ll see well upwards of 1000 hands per hour. This is insane, and I don’t recommend it. But hey, I’ve never been one for masochism.
And the fact that you’re joining the same game more than once doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. It’s just a new way of doing things. Instead of finding a new table in the lobby, you’ve got to pull up your current game’s lobby. Then, you click “join” again.
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