Rampart Online is a new real-money online gambling app regulated by the state of Nevada, which falls under the state’s online poker laws but offers a novel style of gameplay. The app from Real Gaming borrows heavily from the rules of video poker, but turns it into a player-versus-player competition to fit into the state’s regulatory paradigm.
Nevada legalized online gambling in 2011. Although the law allows for virtually any form of iGaming, including online casinos, the Nevada Gaming Commission has only ever used it to authorize player-banked poker. For many years, WSOP has been the only operator offering online poker in Nevada.
Rampart Online is unlike anything else available in Nevada or elsewhere. Bonus spoke with a Real Gaming representative to get a better handle on how it works.
Technically speaking, what it offers would be classified as heads-up sit-and-go tournaments. However, they differ from what you’d see elsewhere in several important ways:
- The game is five-card draw.
- The tournament lasts for only a single hand.
- There is no betting round—the players are effectively “all-in” from the start, so the only decision is which cards to discard.
- In addition to the regular prize pool for the tournament, players can receive a bonus based on the rank of their hand.
What that means in practice is that the game feels a lot more like video poker than a poker tournament. There is a significant amount of strategy, but no bluffing or psychology as there is in other forms of poker.
Rampart Online Poker gameplay
Rampart Online offers tournaments at a variety of stake levels. Bonus’s contact at Real Gaming said that $2 buy-ins are very popular, although there’s significant activity up to $10. These buy-ins reflect the cost of playing a single hand, so they’re bigger stakes than they sound like when compared with the buy-ins for conventional poker tournaments lasting dozens or hundreds of hands.
Each buy-in is divided into three portions:
- Part goes to the main prize pool, to be won by the competitor who makes the better hand.
- Part goes to a promotional pool, which pays out bonuses for big hands.
- Part is collected by the operator as rake: between 2% and 10% depending on the game.
For some stake levels, the main prize pool may only be a single buy-in—half being contributed by each player. That means that winning the tournament only guarantees that the player gets their money back. Turning a profit then becomes a matter of winning bonuses for big hands, much like it is in video poker.
However, some formats differ in that regard. The representative described one game at the $10 tier where winning gets the player a full double-up on their buy-in as long as the winning hand is a pair of Jacks or better. Winning with a lesser hand only results in a push.
The big hand bonuses can be quite generous, however. For instance, the app promotes a $4,500 jackpot for players who make a Royal Flush in a $2 game. Keeping in mind that $1 of each buy-in is going to the main prize pool, that top prize represents a 4,500x payout on the remaining dollar. That’s considerably more aggressive than most video poker pay tables, where the typical payout for a Royal Flush is from 800x to 1,000x.
An experimental, ever-changing product
It’s impossible to provide detailed pay tables for each of the game’s stake levels, because Real Gaming says the game is ever-changing. Just like the bad beat jackpot at a brick-and-mortar card room, the payouts for particular hands can change based on the size of the promotional prize pool at any given time.
Because of the novelty of the product, they’re also adjusting the games based on player preferences and activity levels.
The representative told Bonus that more new products are coming within a matter of months. Although poker purists might raise an eyebrow at a game without bluffing, it’s a breath of fresh air for what has been a single-operator, single-product market for many years.
Given retail casinos’ opposition to digital competition, it may be a long time before Nevada embraces online casinos. However, if Rampart Poker proves successful, it could usher in a new generation of products building fast-paced, casino-like experiences on top of a multiplayer poker foundation.
That trend is something that some online casino operators are also embracing. DraftKings Casino, for instance, while lacking a full-scale online poker product, dipped its toe into the world of casino-poker hybrids with Hart Race Hold’em, pitting the player against a digital opponent whose only move is all-in. It then proceeded to launch a player-versus-player product, Electric Poker, but in a limited way, offering only the fast-paced, three-player “jackpot sit-and-go” format popularized by PokerStars as Spin & Go.
Although mechanically different from either of those products, Rampart Online appears geared at scratching a similar itch.
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