One of the top reasons these days for people to choose online poker over bricks and mortar poker is the ability to play several tables at once. This is known in popular poker vernacular as multi-tabling.

 

The maximum amount of games you can play varies from site to site; of the larger sites iPoker allows you play 16, Full Tilt allows 18, and for the truly sick multi-tabler Pokerstars allows you to indulge in a whopping 24 tables.

This has enormous implications for the poker player, potentially very positive ones. For starters it limits boredom. There is no waiting around for good starting hands, as if you are playing across many tables, you are virtually guaranteed to be getting a starting hand worthy of playing on at least one table every few minutes or so. There is also the potential to increase your poker earnings by playing more than just one table. All sounds good? Well it can be, but it also brings with it potential dangers and pitfalls for the unprepared.

 

Multi-tabling poker can be very mentally demanding. Playing many tables at one time is obviously a far more brain intensive activity than just one-tabling. Having youth on your side is an obvious advantage in this area. However all players regardless of age or ability have to be realistic about their ability to cope with playing so many tables at once.

 

Poker is all about taking a balanced approach, and the player’s approach to multi-tabling should be no different. Poker players need to make courageous decisions at times, whether that’s big bluffs, big calls, big laydowns or for that matter to increase or decrease the amount of tables which they play. Whilst poker players need to be brave, this bravery also needs to be tempered with a certain amount of caution. Newbie poker players should of course be sensible and play just on one table as well as studying the game via poker books, poker articles and/or poker training videos until such time as they feel they have a good grasp on the essentials of the game.

 

If and when a player feels like it’s time to try to multi-table, and let’s be honest here, this is often very much a feeling or intuition than based on pure evidence. If a newbie player is showing a decent profit after 5,000 hands they might be under the impression that after such a ‘large’ amount of hands that this is evidence they have poker ‘cracked’, the reality of the matter is though that such a number of hands is not only not a large amount of hands to determine whether you are a winning player or not but it is nowhere near sufficient, in fact typically you need to be hitting 100,000 hands to get a more realistic picture and even then this is not an absolute guarantee.

 

Ok that’s the bad news, the good news is that if the newbie poker player has started off his/her poker playing in the right manner, they will have access to some poker tracking software like Holdem Manager where they can analyse their stats and other players stats. Talking about using these great but complicated pieces of software would take up several more articles, but suffice to say it’s worth spending time working with them. At the very least a player should take a look at his/her stats. I recently took a look at a very solid 6-max player’s €.5/1 player’s stats. His VPIP (voluntary entered pot) was 21%, his PFR was 17%, and his 3-betting was 6%. There’s a whole host of stats you can get on players, but these 3 are more often than not a good indicator of what a player is about. Note I’m not saying that these are the ideal stats to have for the 6-max player. But ballpark most winning players won’t be too far off these sort of stats. VPIP typically in range of 18-25, PFR typically 14-20, also note that winning players tend to have a fairly narrow gap between VPIP and PFR i.e. the range of hands they are limping or calling raises with preflop is quite low. If they are first into the pot then the majority of the time it’s for a raise. So if you are looking at your data and you see your stats differ wildly from these sort of solid-stats then chances are you’ve just been lucky.

 

In Multi-Tabling Part 2 – Are you ready for it we will take a look at typical winning 6-max player’s stats and discuss further on how a player can recognise the point when he is ready to try multi-tabling.