One of the principal members of the Full Tilt Poker team is Chris Ferguson, who has a PhD in Computer Science (virtual network algorithms). I suspect they’ve put his talents into play. In Full Tilt’s last monthly software update they introduced Rush Poker, bringing some advanced ideas about efficiency to the game (click through for video demo):

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.

In this variant they’re treating all of the players online as a cloud, forming tables and allowing queued actions so that it’s almost always your turn to play. I bet they get can get some sick scheduling optimizations going — holdem is highly structured and they can measure how long you typically take to make a decision, your network latency, (uh oh — also your stack size, skill level), etc…

If you played four tables of Rush Poker you’d probably be able to approach 100% decision time, thus destroying several old adages of the game: the key to good play is patience; know your opponent; play people, not cards; pay attention to how the table is playing — all rendered invalid or impossible. All that remains: start with good hands!

And this is all, of course, patent pending — the IP biz has come to online poker

Patrik Antonius: “Rush Poker is a grinder’s paradise.”