PokerStars‘ long awaited ‘Rush Poker’ competitor hit the client this week and it proved an immediate hit. Of course Rush Poker no longer exists as Full Tilt’s financial and organisational difficulties continue, so at the moment PokerStars only competition in the ‘fast moving’ market is the little known Terminal Poker.
Zoom Poker is very similar in execution to Rush Poker. As soon as you fold at any point in a hand you’re immediately whisked away to another table made of others in the player pool who have also just folded, and a new hand begins straight away. You can even fold and leave the table before its your turn to act, but of course the other players won’t know your intentions until the action comes around to you. For the introduction of Zoom Poker, PokerStars have made their animations crisper and smoother, and closer to what used to be on Full Tilt. They’ve also added a couple of other nice options like being able to stick around at a table to see how the action pans out by holding the CTRL key when you press fold.
As of yet, tracking software packages like Holdem Manager haven’t released an update that will make them compatible with Zoom Poker so its unknown how Zoom will compare with Rush in terms of hands per hour. Initial reports are that it’s a little bit slower, but still in the region of 250 hands per hour on a single table.
At the moment only micro-stakes play is available, with up to 5c/10c being available for Holdem and Omaha. All going well, Stars will add higher stakes as bug are cleared up, though they seem to be few and far between. It’s not known yet when Zoom Poker tournaments will come online, nor whether they have plans to introduce Zoom Poker for other games like Omaha High-Low.
We have no doubt that Zoom Poker will be a roaring success as is the case with everything PokerStars does and they’ll surely be constantly refining and adding improvements to the product.
