Full Tilt’s Rush Poker: boom or bust?

These days, the online poker world is abuzz with Full Tilt’s newest (copyrighted) invention: Rush Poker. It looks like everyone I talk to has already tried the new game, and they’re all delighted with it. They’ve all won at it too.

Now, that leaves several possibilities open. It’s either that all my friends are excellent poker players and they have all indeed taken cash off the Rush Poker tables, or that they’re just a bunch of liars, or that everyone playing Rush Poker wins. That however is highly unlikely as it raises an even more unsettling question: if everyone wins, where the heck does all the money come from?

Anyway, let’s stop the jest right here and let us take a serious look at the things that Rush Poker has going for it and at the things that it doesn’t. A few days ago I read a poker forum somewhere where a poster said something like: this will either be a huge success or a huge bust. Which one will Rush Poker be?

 

Most players who’ve given it a go and most professional players who have expressed an opinion about it, seemed to love it. After all, what is the most annoying thing in online poker as we know it today? The down-times, of course. You pick up an 8,2o, you fold it and then you’re forced to sit there and watch those lucky enough to have picked up better starting hands, play. While this may be great to establish reads on your opponents, everyone will agree that it’s boring as hell.

Rush Poker eliminates all these downtimes. Don’t like your hand? Click “quick fold” and off you go, to another table where the prospect of a monster starting hand awaits you. This allows players to log an unheard-of number of hands each hour, forever changing the face of promotions like sign-up bonuses, rake races, and that of the bog bad wolf itself: rakeback. Rakeback and poker rake are the key words in Rush Poker and I’ll get back to why that is the case shortly.

What other advantages does Rush Poker offer though over its traditional counterparts? In addition to the change of pace (that’s an understatement if I ever saw one), it offers players more privacy, not to mention protection against data mining. Don’t shrug that off…the Isildur1-Brian Hastings incident has drawn a lot of attention to data mining and to its negative effects on the industry lately, and some poker networks have already begun implementing anti-data mining measures to prevent such incidents from ever occurring again. Rush Poker deals a devastating blow to data mining through its very nature. Whisked from one table to another at the speed of light (well, at the speed allowed by their internet connections anyway) players have no time to create profiles on opponents, and not too many reasons to do so either: after all, they’ll be playing their next hand at a different table, so what’s the use of reading one’s current opponents?

 

This “advantage” that I just presented above, is Rush Poker’s biggest shortcoming in the same time, and it’s not a small deal at all. It’s not just a grain of sand caught up in the cogs of the mechanism, it’s a big piece of dirt, one that may end up derailing the whole project. Why? You may ask… Simply because the fact that you’re continuously jumping from one table to another kills the very essence of poker. Poker is supposed to be a game of skill, based on a combination of math and psychology. Take away any of these two components and you’re left with an empty shell. That’s exactly what Rush Poker did. It took away the psychology aspect and left people with a math-based shell that’s relatively easy to abuse within the confines of its own rules. No longer will skilled players be able to make use of their prowess, and skill will once again take a back seat to luck.

Some worry that Rush Poker, as attractive as it may be for beginners, might turn into a trap for them. Weaker players who can barely handle playing at two tables, are definitely not ready for Rush Poker, yet right now they’re over there jumping from one table to another by the thousands.

Since optimal Rush Poker strategy is extremely simple (think one of the simplest, most radical versions of ABC TAG poker), there’s another danger: once everyone catches on, the Rush Poker tables will turn into a hopeless give and take, and not even the best players will be able to wring any juice from them. What that would mean is that the only way to make any sort of money at Rush Poker would be through rakeback.

That takes us to another hidden pitfall that Rush Poker comes fitted with: the poker rake.

Players love the idea of logging as many as 2,500 hands per hour. It’s awesome: it takes the downtimes out of the game, it kills the boredom, and it takes the money out of your pockets through the rake at a never before seen rate. I bet you never considered that. The increased speed of the game will mean that the edges successful players will be able to exploit will get ever smaller, which in turn means that the poker rake will become a bigger and bigger enemy.

Whatever direction Rush Poker evolves in, in its current format, “playing the player instead of playing the cards” as advised by the pros, will be quite impossible.

The Isildur1 fleecing

With the current pace of events in the nosebleed stakes online poker world, writing one such “fleecing” article will probably become a weekly routine for me. Swedish mystery player Isildur1’s appearance or rather reappearance at the highest stakes tables at Full Tilt Poker has ignited an action-frenzy which just can’t seem to settle. He wins big, he loses big and he keeps all the railbirds stuck to their computer screens for hours on end each day. This guy is an anonymous spotlight hog.
Isildur1 has been stealing all the online poker headlines lately. First, he went on a rampage against Tom Dwan, winning around $3 million from the New Jersey wonderkid. Then, he took on Patrik Antonius at the $500/$1,000 tables to drop nearly all his “Dwan money” to him. Win or lose, this guy means business that’s for sure.

The session in which he won the $3 million was in fact a string of sessions in which he and Dwan played nearly as many hands as Dwan and Antonius have in their durrrr challenge series. It took them about a week to reach that mark. It only took Isildur1 2,189 hands to donate all those chips to Patrik Antonius though. As they say: easy come, easier go.

The whole Antonius meltdown thing began fairly dull for Isildur1. Having run out of $500/$1,000 NL Holdem opponents, he was logging some hands over at the $50/$100 PL Omaha tables against Prahlad Friedman and Jani Vilmunen. Tom Dwan had sworn that he’d exact revenge on him and take his money back (he even challenged him to a live heads-up match) but he was unavailable online, being busy with Full Tilt Poker’s Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge in London.
Ever the shrewd prospector, Antonius approached him and eventually talked him into playing with him at the $500/$1,000 PLO tables.

The duo fired up 4 such tables and the slaughter got underway right out of the gate. Antonius made his intentions clear from the get go. He won the first $200k pot within minutes. The Swede had a two pair, but Antonius had flopped a J-high straight to win the pot. It only took about 30 more minutes for the Finn to score another massive pot. This time, his pocket rockets hung on to defeat Isildur1’s pocket Ks. This pot was a $287,000 one and 5 minutes later it was dwarfed by a $408,000 whooper. Needless to say, this one went to Antonius as well, and it wasn’t for lack of a good hand on Isildur1’s part: he had flopped a set of 7s, but Antonius made a wheel on the turn to obliterate him once again.
In about 45 minutes, Antonius was around $500k up on Isildur1. Things only went from bad to worse for the Swede from there. A little later, the two of them combined for the largest online poker pot ever played. The $878,958 monster found its way yet again to Antonius’ stack. That was the point when Isildur1 began to voice his discontent. After some back and forth, the two of them decided to play 2 HA tables, one PLO and a NL Holdem one. Isildur1 was obviously not looking forward to getting felted some more at the PL tables, as his style bests suits NL play. He soon found though that the HA tables that he’d just agreed to play were themselves PL ones. The two then agreed to play 2 NL tables and two PL ones and the slaughter continued. It took Antonius another 60 minutes to get $400k more off Isildur1. The problem for Isildur1 was that Antonius managed to keep the NL Holdem pots they played small, while in the same time escalating the PLO ones the best he could.

After taking down two monster pots, Antonius found himself $2 million above the red line. Slowly going on a tilt, Isildur1 asked Antonius to open up two more PLO tables, in an obvious effort to try to win his losses back. Antonius told him he could only play 4 tables, but even that couldn’t save Isildur1 from bleeding away a further $1 million. Antonius won monster pot after monster pot, including a $572,000 whooper in which Isildur1’s set was put to shame by Antonius’ turned straight.

The one sided whooping only ended when Antonius decided to take a meal break, and left the gold-mine unattended. While Antonius was away, Isildur1 started playing Brian Towsend at the $300/$600 PLO tables. Soon the besieged Swede was $600k up and having caught the scent of blood, he even offered to quit playing Antonius in order to open up a few more tables against Townsend. Townsend declined though and play continued at the 4 tables already open. After some more give and take, Townsend eventually quit, leaving the tables with a $440,000 loss. Left with no alternatives, Isildur1 returned to the Patrick Antonius tables, where the latter kept up his shrewd approach and repotted for less at the NL Holdem tables than at the PLO ones.
Realizing that he was being outsmarted, Isildur1 decided to go with the flow and quit both NL Holdem tables he was playing to add more PLO ones. He must’ve pulled himself together, because he managed to take about $300k back from Antonius, before the Finn decided to call it the day and to head to bed with the profits he’d accumulated.