Full Tilt released Rush Poker earlier this year in an effort to appease people who want to play poker really, really fast.  If you aren’t familiar with it yet, when someone plays Rush Poker, they buy in for whatever amount they would buy into a cash game.  They then join a pool of players consisting of 300-600 people.  Once you fold a hand, you automatically get moved to a new table and start a new hand with new people.  You can pre-fold and get moved in less than a second.  It makes for some seriously fast poker.  Of course, Full Tilt is touting it as the next logical step in the growth of our game.  But what kind of impact can we seriously expect it to have?

Rush Poker is popular at the moment.  They’ve got about 7,000 players spread out amongst their tables, which is a good percentage of the 114,000 or so that are playing on the site at the time.  This caused a bit of unrest through the Internet poker community.  A lot of people have learned how to make some good money by using software to collect betting patterns on their opponents.  But you have to play at least one full hand with a group before you’re able to collect any data.  Rush doesn’t allow that.  It also doesn’t allow you to keep track of who you are playing against.  Lastly, it allows people to patiently wait for a good starting hand instead of getting bored and opening under the gun with 83o.

None of that matters, though.  Internet poker is not going to dry up, and Rush poker is not going to significantly take away from the popularity or profitability of regular games.  Full Tilt likes to introduce new variations of the game (cash out tournaments, matrix tournaments, run it twice, etc.) and it’s natural that these new variations are going to create a lot of initial buzz.   And while Rush might very well maintain a fan base of some size, it isn’t likely going to affect how the game is largely played.  That is, unless you regularly play 12 tables.  That demographic shouldn’t be dismissed.  A lot of people grind their days out multi-tabling cash games.  But there is a reason why most people don’t – it’s very tedious.  Rush Poker does a very good job at making a player feel as though they’re playing 12 or more tables, which isn’t something that most players are going to want to do.  It’s not easy to watch the new episode of The Office or do some homework while playing Rush Poker.  If you’re already a profitable poker player and want to play Rush, then you’ll have to adjust.  That’s what good poker players are supposed to be able to do.  If you can’t turn a profit, then stop playing Rush.