Recently, the brains behind Full Tilt Poker rolled out a face-paced, no-break cash game format called Rush Poker. Allowing players to muck cards in an instant with a special “Quick Fold” feature and move on to the next table and the next hand, Rush Poker has resulted in over 300 hands per hour, a phenomenal improvement over conventional tables. The feedback from PocketFives.com members has been varied, with players calling it everything from “one of the smartest, most innovative business ideas I've seen from FTP” to “the most absurd donkey/fish game I’ve ever seen.”One of the men behind the curtain is ftpdoug, a member of PocketFives.com who regularly speaks on behalf of the world’s second largest online poker site. What went into developing Rush Poker and what kind of reaction has ftpdoug seen on forums like PocketFives.com and TwoPlusTwo? We sat down with the Full Tilt Poker representative to find out.
PocketFives.com: Thanks for talking with us. Rush Poker has already become a hit with the online poker community. What makes the cash game format so appealing?
ftpdoug: There are a few things, but number one is that it's just crazy fun. Players like to be in action and this is just constant action. It has some other advantages as well. A lot of players aren't comfortable playing at more than one table for all sorts of reasons, but would find it appealing to play a lot of hands much faster.
There were a couple of side benefits to making sure it was as fun as possible. For example, we didn't have to have a "Quick Fold" button, but it just wasn't going to be as fun without it. So, we had to figure out how to solve some other problems because we wanted it such as, "If you quick fold and someone is watching the other table you're at and the table you just quick folded from, then he might know you've moved."
That made the decision not to allow any kind of observing a more obvious choice. We probably would have gone that way anyway since it's pretty hard to really get a feel for Rush just by observing, but the side benefit is that the games won't be datamined and we know that's a big concern for a lot of players.
PocketFives.com: What kind of reaction were you expecting?
ftpdoug: Everyone was very excited and nervous the night before. We were pretty sure that we had a winner on our hands, but it's so hard to predict the reaction once it's out there. Maybe some of us were trying to lower our expectations, but we were blown away by the reaction. Poker players on forums are pretty much the harshest critics I've ever seen and the ratio of positive comments to negative comments was just amazing to me.
PocketFives.com: Does the ability to change tables quickly mean that the play will predominantly just be ABC poker?ftpdoug: I think that's one of the great things about a new type of game. The game is going to evolve in about 20 different ways in the first week alone. Players will over-adjust to something, the quick players will adjust to that over-adjustment to take advantage, and so on. I see comments like, "All you have to do is play really tight" or "Everyone is playing super tight, so you should just play 100% of your hands." Well, chances are at least one of those comments is wrong. Probably both!
PocketFives.com: We saw a few posters say that the countdown clock when you first sit down at a table is really dramatic.
ftpdoug: We had a bit of a debate over that countdown. At first it was just a "beep... beep... beep" and I said, "I wonder what it would sound like with a sexy voice." A couple of friends recorded a voice and shipped it over. Boom, instant hit.
PocketFives.com: Some posters have critiqued that the fish will simply go broke faster, exacerbating any depositing issues that exist. How do you react to that?ftpdoug: If a player were somehow destined to go broke in 10,000 hands, which used to take him four weeks and now takes him one week, I guess he'll go broke faster now. It's the same number of hands, though.
As far as deposit problems being exacerbated, I don't think that's an issue. All players are limited in some way. Some have a fixed amount of money they like to play poker with every week and some have a fixed amount of time. For the latter group, we've made it possible to get in a lot more poker in that same limited amount of time.
I have many guesses, but nobody really knows for sure what the net effect will be here. Our hope, of course, is that everyone loves the game and we see lots of new players and lots of returning players come to the site and try it out to see if it's the right game for them.
Check out Full Tilt Poker for full details on Rush Poker. Weigh in by posting in the thread in Poker Discussion.
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