Recent rush poker stories
Full Tilt has a history of tinkering with the status quo of poker, and that reputation was bolstered with the introduction of what could be a game-changer for online poker: Rush Poker.
While Rush Poker shares the same fundamental rules as its non-Rush counterparts, it's different enough that players have a number of questions regarding the format, questions we try to answer as thoroughly as possible in this Rush Poker guide.
Rush Poker is such a simple concept that it’s a little surprising we’re just seeing the innovation at this stage of the online game. Here’s how it works, in a nutshell: when you sit down at a Rush Poker table, you’re essentially joining a large group of players and not just a single table. Let’s call that group the ‘cloud’.
For a hand of Rush Poker table to be dealt, FTP essentially picks nine (or six, if it’s a shorthanded table) players from the cloud, sits them at a table, and deals a hand of poker. Once any player exits from the hand, they immediately return to the ‘cloud’ and are eligible to be picked to play another hand.
That would be a drag if the player pool was small or the software was laggy, but FTP seems to have both covered. In testing of Rush Poker table, hands moved very fluidly from one to the next, and the average hands per hour you’d expect at a normal table are increased by several hundred percent at a rush poker table. It’s aptly named – in many ways you see more action than you do even during certain points of multitabling, because once you fold (or even chose a special quick-fold button) you are immediately moved on to a new hand.
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Yes. You can multi-table Rush Poker, essentially holding multiple spots in the cloud. Obviously, the software never seats you with yourself.
You can play up to 4 tables of any given limit of Rush Poker.
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For cash games, Rush Poker is available in NLHE, LE and PLO. Both full ring and 6-max games are available for no limit and fixed limit holdem. For Pot Limit Omaha, only 6-max tables are available.
Currently, the lowest available stakes for NLHE are .02/.05 and the highest are $2/$4 (full ring only, still classified as experimental). The lowest available stakes for PLO are .05/.10 and the highest is .50/$1.
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Absolutely. Full Tilt offers Rush Poker MTTs. They’re listed in the MTT lobby with a black R symbol next to the tournament name. In the Standard view, you can either use the main filter (show below) to access Rush tournaments…
… or you can use the Advanced Filter:
There are some key differences between Rush Poker cash and Rush Poker MTT, as well as between Rush Poker MTT and standard MTT. You can read a more in-depth article about them here; a quick list is below:
- No hand for hand play
- Final table reverts to typical tournament format
- Blinds are determined both by hands and time since last blind posted
- Tables are not combined aggressively near the end of Rush Poker MTTs; tables stay short once the tournament hits 30 until a final table is reached.
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Yes, the newly introduced Multi-entry tournaments are available in Rush Poker format.
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You take a seat at the table in a fashion similar to taking a seat at a standard cash game table at Full Tilt Poker. First, find the games in the lobby:
Standard View:
Basic View:
Choose the limit you’d like to play from the lobby. That will bring up the ‘lobby’ for that particular cloud. To join, just click the join now button in the top right:
Once you click join, you’ll be taken to the buy in screen, where you decide how much money you’d like to sit down with. You can reload at any time from within Rush Poker.
Once you’ve bought in, you’ll move to a countdown screen. After a quick 3-2-1 you’ll immediately be dealt into a hand.
From that point on, the moment you exit a hand, you’ll immediately move on to another hand. It is the fastest poker you can play at a single table, hands-down. If you want it to move even quicker, you can select the ‘quick fold option’ that allows you to pre-fold your hand before the action gets to you and moves you straight into another hand.
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Here are a couple of articles we’ve published regarding tools that can help you succeed at Rush Poker:
Tools for helping you beat Rush Poker
Custom HUD (heads-up display) for Rush Poker
CardRunners has a number of Rush Poker videos.
The Basic Differences Between Rush Poker and Standard Poker
There are a few things that you need to be aware of before jumping into a Rush Poker table. You’re going to be hitting an incredibly high number of hands per hour, between 200-350 on most tables with player pools over 150. The biggest change is how quick one of these tables will be progressing from one hand to another; as soon as you fold, you’re going to be whisked away to another table, with a hand waiting for you just as quickly. This means that playing Rush Poker requires a level of focus and attention you may not be used to devoting to your online game. When you’re playing Rush for the first time, it’s probably a good idea to clear everything else off of your plate, meaning Facebook, texting, TV and other distractions need to be off and your mind and concentration to be squarely focused in on Rush.
You’ll be doing a lot of note taking and making a lot of quick decisions, which will tax your time enough; this is a little trickier than simply multitabling, because the player list every hand is going to shift. The guy that was the button last time may be in the big blind the next time you play him, meaning you have to keep tabs on how he plays certain hands when you get involved in pots with him.
Why? Because the shifting nature of Rush can make you play hands incorrectly. You see someone making a seemingly super strong move under the gun with kings and immediately perceive him to be an ultra tight, smart player after a single hand. You don’t bother to note the hand in the cutoff where he four bet you and got all-in on the flop with J9s, because you already had your “tight” note set on him. Be sure to note hands you play through to completion with people; their holdings, how aggressive they played the hand, important little notes that allow you to piece together a playing style for the player in question. In normal ring game, you’re always playing the player in the same position, every hand.
Even though the player mix will change from hand to hand, the player pools aren’t huge enough to where you won’t play many, many hands with some of your opponents. With a 200 player pool in a 9 handed game, if you play 200 hands in an hour, you’ll have 1600 different player arrangements per hour; you will play the same players more than once, so even though it may not seem apparent initially, note taking is an important aspect of being a profitable Rush player. This shift is a big change in the approach to playing Rush compared to normal ring game.
Differences between .50/1 and 1/2 NLHE 6 max
The game gets much, much more aggressive when you move from the lower limit to the higher – much more than you’d probably expect. Chalk this up to the fact that 1/2 is the highest limit available at this point, so that’s where the toughest players tend to pool, creating a much greater skill and aggression jump than you’d normally assume there would be.
The result is that you can generally nit it up safely at .50/1, but you must not give the same credit to three bets preflop and postflop moves at 1/2 that you’d be inclined to at 50/1. If you play a little bit at each level, you’ll probably be surprised by how infrequent three-betting is preflop at the lower level and how automatic it seems at the higher level.
People are bluffing the river less in Rush Poker
It’s just true, and it’s so true that it overwhelms the fact that some regulars are now bluffing more. The fact of it is that people play a lot tighter when they’re playing Rush Poker, and that means they just get to the flop and turn light way less often than they would otherwise. If you want to pick off a river bluff, make sure it’s against a regular who you’ve seen pull the move before and not against a random – there’s just not a high enough chance that he’s bluffing to make the call worth it.
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It varies per player, but we’ve worked out that about $20 an hour is a good estimate for someone 4-tabling a mix of .50/1 and $1/2 6 max games. Especially if you use Table Ninja, racking up hands in Rush Poker is disgustingly easy – the quick fold button allows you to cram in several thousand hands in just an hour or two.
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Pretty quickly. In our tests, we found that a standard FTP bonus, clearing at .06 per Full Tilt Point, clears at a rate of just about $30 per hour if you four-table .5/1 Rush No Limit 6-max.
That’s a pretty good hourly, so if you get a bonus offer from FTP and you’re comfortable multi-tabling, you might want to consider Rush Poker as a way to clear that bonus.
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