When Full Tilt Poker bid the world an abrupt “adieu,” it took with it four things from the poker community. Our money, our money, our money…and Rush Poker. Oh, Rush Poker, how we loved thee. For many around the world who are still able to play online poker, the absence of Rush Poker has left a gaping hole in their lives. But never fear, the game you have come to adore is back, just under a different name. PokerStars has released its version of the fast paced poker game, dubbed Zoom Poker.
Zoom Poker is essentially just like the old Rush Poker. You sit down at a ring game table (Zoom Poker is only for ring games at the moment, not tournaments) and play a hand as normal. As soon as you fold, you are whisked away to a new table, complete with new players. When that hand is over for you, be it when you fold, when you win the hand, or when you muck at showdown, you “zoom” over to another table to play in another fresh hand. Rinse, repeat. PokerStars has even added the option to “fast fold,” which will allow you to fold before it is your turn to act, provided you are not facing a bet.
Rather than picking a table and sitting down like you would in a normal game, you instead select the stakes at which you would like to play. Zoom Poker will then insert you into the player pool for those stakes and find a table at which to start. According to PokerStars, you will usually be seated in the big blind on your first hand, but from there on out, seat assignments are totally random.
For those who wish to see the end of the hand after folding, all that needs to be done is to hold down the CTRL key while clicking the “fold” button. This cannot be done with the “fast fold” option, though.
Zoom Poker is currently in beta mode, so options will be limited as it is live tested. It is currently only available at micro-stakes for No-Limit Hold’em and Pot-Limit Omaha games and each player pool is capped at around a couple thousand players. Players may have up to four Zoom Poker tables open at once, though that may increase to six in the near future. From what we have heard, it sounds unlikely that PokerStars will allow players to multi-table Zoom Poker as much as they would in regular ring games. Zoom Poker has also not been rolled out to every PokerStars site yet, as the company is releasing it increments to make sure bugs get ironed out.
PokerStars, as usual, is the world’s largest online poker room this week. According to industry monitoring site PokerScout.com, PokerStars has a seven-day average of 25,400 cash game players, totally and completely outdistancing its nearest competitor, PartyPoker. PartyPoker has a seven-day average of just 4,250 cash game players. PokerStars is so big, in fact, that it has more cash game players than the next thirteen poker rooms and networks combined.