Full Tilt Poker’s new Adrenaline Rush Poker has only been active for two weeks and already the site has launched a special promotion around the lightning-fast game. Called Adrenaline Rush Knockout, it is a two-week long contest to see who can take the most opponents down to the felt.
To review, Adrenaline Rush Poker is a variant of Full Tilt’s ever-popular Rush Poker, the fast-fold version of regular poker. As if Rush Poker wasn’t fast enough, Adrenaline is Rush Poker on, well…adrenaline. There are not many differences between the two games, but the ones that exist are significant. The first and most obvious when you sit down is that all the games are four-handed, meaning the blinds hit you much more frequently. The biggest difference, though, is that there is no calling in Adrenaline Rush. The only moves you have are raise or fold.
Because of this change in the game mechanics, all the action takes place pre-flop. In one scenario, everyone ends up folding to a pre-flop raiser or the big blind gets a walk. In the other scenario, two or more players keep raising each other until they are all-in. Either way, there are no post-flop decisions. Want to stay in the hand? You have to raise pre-flop. Otherwise, get out. It’s a game for players who want to mainline action.
Because of the way the game plays out, it lends itself very well to the Adrenaline Rush Knockout competition. The contest is very simple: a player earns one point for every time he notches a “knockout,” meaning each time he takes all the chips an opponent has on the table. Just like in a tournament, except this is a cash game.
There are three leaderboards that correspond to the table stakes: low, medium, and high. Players’ points are added to their leaderboard totals based on the tables on which they play. The contest is divided into two one-week periods, the first of which ends this coming Sunday. The top 100 players on each of the three leaderboards at the end of the weekly period win cash prizes.
The “Low” leaderboard will awards $5,000 in total prizes with $600 going to the winner, the “Medium” will award $10,000 in sum with $1,100 going to the winner, and the “High” leaderboard will dole out $15,000 with $1,600 going to the eventual winner.
Since Adrenaline Rush is a cash game, players can always re-buy after busting out, so it is entirely possible to earn knockouts of the same player more than once in a session. It will take some work for those just starting to cash up to the top 100 on the “Low” and “Medium” leaderboards, but it may be possible to make the money on the “High” leaderboard, as the bottom rungs only have 20 points right now. What is nice about this promotion is that because the all-in or fold style of play is natural in Adrenaline Rush, it doesn’t require a change in strategy to earn points. Just a lot of luck.