Rush Poker Tournaments
For all the excitement of poker, there’s actually a lot of downtime when you play. Every time you fold a hand, you’re forced to wait around until the next hand begins. Considering that in most hands you’ll fold before the flop, this adds up to a lot of dead time that you can’t get back.
Full Tilt Poker’s new Rush Poker aims to fix that by getting you as many hands as possible, without any downtime. Each time you fold a hand (or the hand ends for any other reason), you’ll instantly be taken to a new table where you can play a new hand. With Rush Poker, there’s never any downtime – you’re constantly playing poker, with no breaks.
Rush Poker tournaments work on the same principle as Rush Poker cash games: more hands equal more fun. When a Rush Poker tournament begins, the entire field is thrown into a single player pool and randomly seated at a table. But don’t expect to be getting any reads from your opponents; as soon as you’re out of the hand (by folding, going to showdown, or winning the pot), you’ll immediately find yourself at a new table with new opponents.
What really makes a Rush Poker tournament fast-paced is the Quick Fold button. This allows you to choose to fold a hand before the action even gets to you – meaning that when you have a weak hand that you know you won’t want to play, you can immediately ditch it to get to a new table with new opponents.
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As players are eliminated in a Rush Poker tournament, things will begin to change. First, you’ll probably notice that you’re seeing the same players more often, since the player pool is shrinking. When the pool gets very small – 28 players or less – the remaining tables will start playing short-handed. This is done to keep the pace of play as fast as possible. Tables will continue to get shorter (depending on the tournament, as short as four- or three-handed) until the final table is reached. At that point, the tournament will revert to the standard tournament format, where everyone stays in their seats and only one hand is played at a time.
When playing in a Rush Poker tournament, you’ll quickly realize that there are several differences when compared to the standard tournaments you’re used to. The most notable one, of course, is the pace of play. Because you can simply dump a hand whenever you don’t feel like playing it, you’ll be seeing a lot more hands. It’s quite common to instantly fold four or five hands in a row in only a few seconds before finding a hand you might want to play.
What’s to stop someone from folding excessively in a Rush Poker tournament, and only playing the biggest hands when they happen to get them? Actually, this is one area in which a Rush Poker tournament isn’t too different from a regular poker tournament. As always, you’re going to have to pay your blinds and antes, which will eat away at your stack. Blinds are assigned to the players who have gone the longest without posting each time a new table is created; this is based on a combination of how many hands you have played and the length of time on the clock since the last time you posted a blind.
Another major difference you’ll see in Rush Poker tournaments is the inability to get reads on your opponents – and the fact that they can’t get a read on you, either. This is especially true at the beginning of a tournament, when there might be hundreds or thousands of players constantly moving to new tables. Nobody will know if you’ve been playing tightly or loosely, aggressively or passively. Every hand in a Rush Poker tournament is an entirely new experience with fresh, unknown opponents, so it’s not worth trying to create a table image: you may never see the same players again!
Rush Poker tournaments are an entirely new way of playing poker, but if you’re familiar with regular tournament poker, there’s nothing to fear; the rules of the game are still the same, and the goal is still to get to the final table and eliminate all of your opponents. What Rush Poker tournaments change is the pace of play, making every moment of each tournament fast and furious, with one hand after another testing your abilities and your reflexes. If you’re looking for a new poker challenge that’s faster and more exhilarating than anything you’ve ever played before, head on over to Full Tilt Poker and give Rush Poker tournaments a try!