MULTI-TABLING - TO BE OR NOT TO BE

Today’s poker players bear little or no resemblance to their ancestors of yesteryear. Gone forever are the dashing river boat gamblers and the scruffy tough cowboys playing for their wages in saloons all over the wild west. Gone also are the grifters and hustlers of the early Vegas era of the sixties and early seventies. Games like five card draw and five card stud used to be the norm in days gone by. These games however have been replaced by faster and more exciting forms of poker like Hold’em and Omaha and the split pot games.

Tournament poker was introduced after the second world war with few people realising just how popular that was going to become in the future. But by far the biggest and most dramatic change of the lot has been caused by the invention of the Internet. Poker and the Internet proved to be a match made in heaven and after the initial security fears were dispelled, online poker has literally spread like wildfire with millions of active players on any given day and billions of dollars a year being wagered.

Suddenly, Peter from Vienna can play with Martin from Stockholm and Igor from Moscow all in the luxury surroundings of their very own home. But the invention of online poker has brought many more dramatic changes for the game besides being able to play poker with many different people from across the globe. One of those changes has been the ability to play more than one table at a time or “multi-tabling” to give it the proper name.

Now a player can have numerous games on their monitor at any one time and as long as they can handle the increased action and speed then it is an action junkies paradise. Playing four tables at once essentially means that you will nearly always be in action somewhere. Numerous stories and tales abound about the subject of multi-tabling and much of what you hear is hogwash. I have read articles from so called “experts” who go on about how multi-tabling can increase your earn rate and how it can do this and that.

Well, putting on some after shave will make me smell good but that is highly unlikely to get me a date with Cameron Diaz now is it?

Can you beat One Table

Let me get one thing absolutely one hundred per cent clear here from the very beginning, multi-tabling is not an automatic path to riches! For multi-tabling to prove profitable then you must know that you have the skills to beat one table before you tackle any more. So how do you know that you can beat one table? Simple, by logging enough hours and keeping track of your results. There are two factors that determine success in poker, money won and time played.

Winning a lot of money in some tournament after having only been playing the game for a couple of months is hardly an indication that you will be ahead after another five years of playing. Also someone is not going to impress me by saying that they have been playing poker for thirty years either. Success in poker is based on money won and time played and not one or the other. It is why the most successful players in WSOP history are not always the ones with the greatest prize money.

The recent WSOP winners have benefited by winning tournaments that had prize pools that were many times greater than the same tournaments that their ancestors were winning. The winner of the 2006 World Series Jamie Gold, won $12 Million dollars, a figure that is substantially greater than the old $1 Million dollars that winners used to get. In fact going back even further to the seventies and eighties, the winners did not even get a million. Getting back to the point then, successful poker players can only deem to be successful if they have logged enough hours at the table or played in enough tournaments. If you do not know or suspect that you are not a winning player on one table then why in heavens name would you want to play more tables?

Winning Players Can Suffer As Well

We are not just talking about losing players here either because a player that has a proven track record of being able to beat one table should still have a good long hard think about taking on more tables. I will just digress here for a minute by saying that there is essentially nothing wrong with multi-tabling even if you are aware that you are a losing player if all you crave is the increased action and poker is nothing more than just entertainment to you. But if you crave to make it as a winning player then you are going to have to take your game a lot more seriously and this includes not multi-tabling until you are technically good enough.

But like I have just said, even for the players who are good at poker and win at it regularly then multi-tabling may still be the wrong move. Firstly let me point out that it is quite rare that I multi-table at all. I do this for several reasons and each reason highlights a key principle in whether or not you should multi-table.

It just does not feel like poker!

Maybe it is just me but whenever I have multi-tabled, it just feels to me that I am running around on some motorised hamster wheel. Everything is running at breakneck pace and this just begins to feel less and less like real poker to me. Whenever you are playing online then you already have the problem of Internet poker not being the same as live play and this is a factor that can lead many players into making fundamentally bad decisions.

But on top of all this, the hands whiz by so fast when you play many tables at once that it just stops feeling like proper poker to me and I stop enjoying the game. To me, poker is a contest between humans with money involved and luck thrown in. I want to outplay and outthink my opponents and know how they think so that I can develop plans and strategies to combat their individual styles of play. When you are multi-tabling then you lose an awful lot of this simply because you just do not have the time to gather this kind of information. This is not the only reason that I shy away from multi-tabling but it is the main one.

Your earn rate per table suffers as a result!

I don’t care who you are or how good you think you are, there is just no way that you are going to replicate your earn rate for a second table that you have on one table. If you can replicate your earn rate for a second table then you cannot be playing the one table properly. You may think that you are playing two tables identically but that is just not possible. Sure, if you are a very good player then you can be a winning player on two tables or even three or four but if your earn rate for one table was 3 big bets per hour for instance then trying to emulate that on other tables is an exercise in futility.

If you just happen to miss one piece of vital information that saves you a bet in limit hold’em all because you were involved in a pot on the other table then you are failing to replicate your earn rate on the second table. There are only two types of player who can replicate their earn rate on a second table, players who are deluding themselves into thinking that they can and players who are not playing the one table optimally in the first place.

What game are you playing?

Certain games lend themselves better to multi-tabling than others. Limit hold’em is an excellent game to multi-table at simply because many of the decisions are semi automatic. Notice here that I said semi automatic and not automatic. This is because most decisions in poker are not as clear cut as many people think they are, even the ones that seem obvious on the surface have hidden nuances and subtleties. But whenever I have multi-tabled, I have tended to do it playing limit hold’em above any other game.

Seven card stud on the other hand is not a very good game to be multi-tabling. Unlike hold’em, this game requires that you memorise which cards have been exposed in order to maximise how you are playing the game and your chances of winning. It is sometimes difficult to remember the exposed cards on one table at seven stud let alone several at the same time.

Omaha is a very technical game and is regarded by many as being the most technical form of poker out there at this time and especially pot limit Omaha. But yet a good Omaha player could fare better playing multiple tables than a good seven stud player simply because you do not have to remember the cards like you do in stud.

I always think that a very dangerous game to multi-table at is No Limit hold’em although this kind of depends on what level you are playing at and who your opposition is. At my usual $10-$20 No Limit that I play, I tend to only ever play one table. The players at that level tend to be good players and I want every piece of conceivable edge that I can lay my hands on in order to do battle with them.

When multi-tabling works

Remember that I stated earlier that if a player could replicate their single table earn rate on a second table then they were not playing the single table properly to begin with? Well although that is perfectly true, it does not mean that you cannot earn more money playing several tables instead of one. For example, lets us say that a good limit hold’em player can earn two big blinds per hour when he plays on one table at $20-$40. This means that his earn rate would be $80 per hour on that one table.

But what if this player could win on four tables playing a semi-automatic game and win at a rate of one big blind per hour per table. Although he cannot replicate his earn rate for one table when he undertakes to play others at the same time, he is in fact earning twice as much money as he was before he switched to multi-tabling.

Earning four lots of $40 per hour equals $160 per hour compared to the $80 what he had been earning previously. But the important factor in this example was that this player not only had a proven earn rate at one table, he also had a very healthy earn rate on one table as well. An earn rate of two big blinds per hour in a full ring game in limit hold’em whether you are playing live or online is a very healthy earn rate indeed. Being in this position means that our player could afford to take a dip in his earn rate for a second table and as long as that dip was not more than one big blind per hour then he would be no worse off. Having a healthy proven earn rate for a single table is a springboard to multi-table success because you are now operating from a position of strength and not weakness.

The common pitfall

The problem lies when you get a player who has an earn rate of about half of one big blind per hour or $20 per hour in our $20-$40 example. This type of player is very common. They have worked on their game far more than the average player and can grind out a small but steady income providing that they don’t play at too high a level. But earning $20 an hour in a $20-$40 ring game online may be far better than your average poker player can achieve but it is not enough to merit playing more tables.

Most poker players are losing poker players over the long term so our limit grinder is doing very well….but not well enough to multi-table successfully! If he can only earn $20 an hour when playing at his very best on one table then there is no indication whatsoever that he can earn another twenty dollars an hour playing a second table. This player is not all that far away from breaking even actually so they definitely cannot afford to become complacent with that kind of earn rate.

Remember one very important thing as you go through your poker career, under no circumstances should you automatically base your playing decisions on what some other player is doing or what “advice” you may have read from some website or magazine without actually putting a great deal of thought into it yourself. Switching from playing a single table to several may just be the best thing that you ever did as an online player but watch out……because it may also just be the worst!

 This article was written for the World Poker Tour magazine and has been reproduced here with their kind permission.

Related Links on PokerSharkPool.com

Crushing Online Single Table Tournaments - Carl's Sit and Go Ebook

Read Articles written by 'The Dean'
Read Carl's Blog
Carl Interviews some well known players
Test your knowledge with the Poker Quizzes

One-On-One Poker Tuition by Carl Sampson
Carl's BlackJack Course

Online Poker Room Reviews
Visit Our Tournament Section