Multitabling - more poker per hour

‘Multitabling’ is one of those poker terms which gets underlined in red by my computer, along with ‘rebuy,’ ‘freezeout,’ ‘softplay,’ and ‘overbet’, which nevertheless is now a solid piece of poker terminology, understood instantly by anyone who’s used a PC to play the game. It means to play two or more tables online simultaneously, thereby upping the number of hands played per hour, and hopefully making the game more profitable for a winning player.

But there’s more to it than that; I know several people who play as many tables at once as will fit on their screen(s), and there is definitely a trade-off between noting detail and increasing the number of hands played, between paying attention to opponents and taking on more, weaker ones. There are also distinctions between playing multiple cash games, and that internet staple sit’n’gos. At its base, multitabling is designed to lower short-term variance by spreading the risk across simultaneous games. So in a simple case if you play for an hour on two cash tables and are up $100 on one, and down $70 on the other, you’re winning $30 for that hour. If you’d just played on one of those tables, an unrealistic profit or loss might have been temporarily recorded, until you’d played enough hours for it to balance out into a more accurate hourly rate. If the extra strains on your attention are manageable, there is obviously a much quicker illustration of your average win rate at a particular game – and a less swingy one.

To start with cash games, the first time one attempts to play two tables at the same time can be a bit confusing. Even when used to the software, when a big decision pops up at both tables, one of them will inevitably beep you with that stressful ‘Time Is Running Out’ noise and it is important to do something before you’re auto-checked or folded. I would recommend, therefore, that those sites which give you a reasonable amount of time to act are best for beginner multitablers; obvious though it sounds, there will be times when just one other table puts extra stress on decisions. A mistake like pulling the slider too far or pressing the wrong button can be a costly one and easier to make than most people like to admit. For the same reasons, software which makes betting more difficult than it need be (e.g. poorly thought-out non-incremental sliders or a difficult manual-input bet system) or which, when tables overlap, place the ‘call’ button right where the ‘check’ was a second earlier, should be avoided.

Almost all sites allow multiple tables to be opened nowadays – some limit you to two or four, but some let you open as many as you can handle. You get a warning on Paradise, for example, upon opening a second table, that you have to act in a reasonable time and not hold up the game for other people – it is annoying when someone’s concentration lapses rather than their connection and they’re timed out over and over again. But generally after a brief practise, playing two cash tables is not terribly tricky; it’s when you get to playing more than that that the level of concentration needed to keep up gets higher.

Detail starts to slip through the cracks: the maniac ‘TeddyKGB’ who was sat on your left may have been replaced with the rock ‘KGBTeddy’ and when you call his large raise you may have gotten yourself into trouble by dint of having missed his arrival at the table. When hands involving other players get to showdown, you will probably be more interested in the table on which you’re currently involved in a hand, and the all-important information on your opponents goes unnoticed. Your starting hand selection criteria might become routine – for those with short attention spans the desire to be in lots of pots out of boredom with playing tight will be satisfied by the multitable experience, but if anyone is paying attention (not guaranteed) your tight image can be used against you. The old enemy predictability can cause you problems, with your attention being strained between several games, and only seconds per decision. Conversely, if you notice a player is sat at several tables, their concentration might not be fully on your game and they’re less likely to be making moves when tight play tends to pay off online anyway.

Some internet players I know never play more than one table – when their full attention is focused on one group of players they make consistently good decisions, and see no reason to distract that focus from a game through playing another one. At a high level, I tend to agree, but at the low to mid level games there is something to be said for playing more hands per hour at the expense of total concentration. Say you usually play the $100 no-limit hold’em game, and are properly bankrolled for it. Is it the same as playing two $50 No-limit games? Not exactly: your risk is spread, you play more hands, the smaller games are more popular, so there are more of them to choose from, and there’s an argument that they’re generally softer too. The part about playing more hands is the important one, however – if you are a winning player, then surely the more hands played the better – over time this should increase the amount you win (this is why online itself is so popular: the amount of practise beginners get in a short time, and the sheer efficiency of automated dealing etc.).

So what about sit’n’gos? There are online players who do nothing but play these, all day every day. The format is appealing to all players, they take far less time than multitable tournaments and they are available at all levels from $1 to $1,000. The $10 sit’n’gos on Party Poker used to fill up so fast that anyone with an older computer used to find themselves clicking on an empty table and finding it full by the time it opened. The standard of play on these can be truly abominable, but the fast and loose way a lot of players attack these little tournaments make them an extremely high variance proposition. The answer? Play lots of them at once.

There is almost a formula for these (debated at great length on forums with the solutions being justified by mountains of statistics from things like Poker Tracker). I heard of a bot which was created for the sole purpose of trying an ‘all-in or fold’ tactic on sit’n’gos. I don’t think it made money, but they were on the right lines. Success in sit’n’gos is erratic, especially when the blinds are raised per 10 hands, for example, rather than by time. Very quickly you are forced to double up or bust, which makes for a very pared down strategy. Playing almost by rote, the best way to go for these tourneys seems to be to play lots of them and get a handle on your average win per go quickly that way. It won’t be a lot.

A friend of mine who’s been an off-and-on internet pro for a number of years plays an extraordinary eight sit’n’gos at once. Playing at the $50 level, he was averaging $40 profit an hour. If he played just one sit’n’go at a time, he would average a $15 return per game. Playing eight, the per table win rate went down to around $7 – but as long as the overall per hour rate goes up, the sacrifice in per table profit is acceptable, irrelevant in fact.

Playing a shedload of tables at once invariably leads to a lot of good or bad things sometimes happening simultaneously. There is nothing like busting out of four or five sit’n’gos on the same hand to sour your mood– but somehow the emotional reaction to situations is diminished by the fact that there are more where those came from, and you’re still playing them. If you’re a natural tilter, this can be dangerous, however: don’t let the bad run on one table spoil your play on the other three.

So to start multitabling, pick a site you’re familiar with, with sensible, easy-to-use software, stay away from the ‘turbo’ tables and start slowly. Although it might be tempting to sit down at a hold’em cash game, an Omaha sit’n’go and a fixed limit multitable tournament just because you can, I don’t recommend it. But with a sensible approach, playing more of a game you win at has a good chance of increasing profitability, which is the whole idea.