Last week Full Tilt released Rush Poker, a new "hands-on-demand" online poker concept that enables the fastest games of poker the world has seen. From the Full Tilt website:

Warning: Rush Poker is extremely fast paced – prepare yourself for the most intense poker action in the world! Available exclusively at Full Tilt Poker, Rush Poker is the ultimate high-speed poker experience. This new poker format is designed to minimize your wait time between hands and keep you in the action. You’ll join a large player pool and face a different table of opponents every hand you play. When you fold your hand, you’ll be rushed to another table for a new hand right away. To play even faster, use the Quick Fold button to move to a new table for the next hand immediately.

By dealing you a new hand at a new table every time you fold—instead of forcing you to wait on your opponents—Rush Poker creates a frictionless poker game that can deliver speeds of up to 600 hands per hour at a single table. Yet despite its name, Rush Poker doesn't actually feel rushed. Like driving a well-built car, you just cruise along, unconscious of your speed until you glance down at the speedometer.

So yeah, Rush Poker is the fastest game of poker in the world, but not in the intense, balls-to-the-wall, Team America Fuck Yeah! sort of way that people are describing it. Playing Rush is more like driving the Autobahn. Efficiency, not excess, is the watchword.

That efficiency is possible thanks to a first-of-its-kind (in online poker) automated player seating system and a streamlined fold and forget user interface that allows you to play a new hand at a new table the instant you click the Fold button. My only complaint? I wish the Quick Fold button was fully twice as large.

I say that because the Fold button in its different incarnations (Quick Fold, Fold checkbox, etc.) is the focal point of Rush Poker. The designers have done an amazing job of creating an experience in which the Fold button actually starts to feel like a big NEXT button, pulling you from one hand, to the next, to the next. It's effortless and intuitive and there's a distinct sense of momentum to it, reinforced by the slide and fade animations the software uses to transition between hands.

Imbuing the most odious button in the game of poker (the Fold button) with the promise of better cards and greener pastures is a neat trick. There's a subtle reinforcement loop in effect here—click this big shiny button repeatedly and get rewarded with new cards! But notice that every bullet point on the Rush Poker feature list is designed to help or enable the player in some way:

By making it easier for them to fold .

. By wasting less of their time

By preventing collusion with randomized seating

with randomized seating By removing speedbumps like waiting lists and reserved seats

like waiting lists and reserved seats By freeing the player to join or leave any game at any time for any reason without paying a penalty in blinds, double-paying the blinds, wasting some of his allotted hands for the blind, and other messiness.

any game at any time for any reason without paying a penalty in blinds, double-paying the blinds, wasting some of his allotted hands for the blind, and other messiness. By getting rid of messy blinds like dead smalls and late-positions.

And of course, I'm sure there's a decent profit incentive in there as well. But looking over that laundry list of features, I think you'll agree. Pound for pound, Rush Poker is the most outlandishly clever and yet succinct innovation online poker has ever seen. It's an evolutionary leap, complete with forebidding stone monolith and tribe of genuflecting cavemen.

It really has to be experienced to be believed.

Now you can't actually observe a Rush Poker table in action unless you're seated and playing—Rush Poker tables are transient, you could even call them solipsistic—so your best bet is to head over to Full Tilt and try it out first hand. Rush is currently being offered in microlimit NLH and PLO flavors during its "test the waters" phase. For more information, check out the usual suspects:

Official Rush Poker website

Full Tilt forum's Rush Poker thread

Two Plus Two official Rush Poker thread

CardsChat.com Rush Poker thread

Google

Oh, and you PokerTracker/Hold'emManager cats will be pleased to hear that both tools will support Rush Poker. For PokerTracker, a new Rush-compatible HUD is in the works. Here's a preview:

Hold'em Manager achieves something similar by exporting player statistics into the Full Tilt player notes which can then be viewed on hover or with the click of a mouse.