Rush Poker

Whoa dagg....loooooooooooong time no post. I really apologize. At first traveling for nearly a month around Christmas was keeping me away from posting, and then I ran bad in life for a while, which has limited my productivity in many spheres. Both professionally and personally, the last month or so has been probably the toughest of my life. But I'm working through it, and hope to come out of it a much better person, no matter how things turn out. That vague enough for you guys?

Anyway, a mitigating factor that really has me looking on the bright side of life is Rush Poker, the new gimmick at Full Tilt. I tried it out for the first time tonight and God is it awesome. The deal is, you're basically place at a new table with a random group of players every hand. Whereas when multi-tabling, if you click the auto-fold button, you have to wait for the hand to finish to get dealt a new hand, in Rush Poker, you can 'Quick Fold' and just get insta-dealt a new hand at a new table. The pros:

1) You can still multi-table it. It looks like 4 is about the most Rush tables anyone is playing right now, which I think might get you over 1,000 hands an hour. I was playing two tables just to get the hang of it and managed to get in 413 hands in 41 minutes. You'd have to be playing really sick numbers of non-Rush tables to get this many hands/hour.

2) Another factor that adds to your hands/hour is that you don't have to wait for a seat to open up at a table, and you don't have to worry about tables breaking. Also you don't wait to get to your big blind at the end of a session, when you might be down to playing just 2-3 tables at the tail end of a session. With Rush tables you're up to your peak hands/hour rate right when you sit down, and you never slow down until you decide to end the session. By the same token, it's much easier to take a bathroom or snack break.

3) Much easier on the eyes. Four-tabling Rush tables gets you sick hands/hour without having to try and read the small numbers and fonts and whatnot if you're instead trying to 12- or 16-table traditional tables.

A few cons:

1) You can't use a HUD, because the tables are changing every hand. This does matter, but if you know your game well, then you know who the solid regulars are and you can pretty much assume everybody else is likely to be a weaker player, although you don't know if they're just weak/tight or loose/passive or a monkey or what. But hey, that's what notes are for!

2) You can't table select. Everybody gets the same chance of getting a whack at the donks in the player pool, which is good if you would otherwise be sitting on an 8-person waitlist hoping to get the Jesus seat on a 89/12 fish, but bad if you would otherwise already have that seat and four others like it because you are a derty table selector. If a lot of your profitability comes from game selection and you can't beat the slightly-better-than-average player at your stakes, Rush might be worse for you.

3) You are taken to a new table as soon as you fold, so you can't get reads on players by watching hands where they show down against players other than you. Full Tilt still downloads the entire hand history so you can look at it later in HEM or whatever program you use, but then you'll have to look at it there and somehow go back and find any player you want to make notes on, which is annoying.

4) By the same token, you can't build up a particular dynamic with a specific player or the entire table where you steal a few times and then tighten up and hope to get a big hand to get paid off with. This can be good or bad...if you use this strategy successfully a lot, then obviously Rush takes it away from you. But if you're bad at this type of leveling war, no worries, Rush to the rescue.

5) Availability. Right now they have only up to $.5/1, but I'd imagine that will change soon.

Hope to be posting more in the future. Good luck at the tables!

-BRUECHIPS