One of the greatest benefits of playing online poker is that you are able to play as many tables as you want to at the same time. This allows you to get in significantly more hands per hour than was ever possible before, increasing your overall hourly win rate. It is important, however, that you find a good balance between the number of tables you play and your ability to play well at those tables. Each extra table you play requires a certain amount of attention and that degrades your overall decision making capability. Multi-tabling is a powerful resource, but requires careful use to attain optimal results.
Any time you are dividing your focus between multiple tables, you profitability at each table is going to suffer. With multi-tabling the key is to find a balance between the number of tables you can play and your overall hourly win rate. Consider this situation: you are currently playing one table of $.50/1 NL Hold’em 6-max and winning at a rate of 10bb/100. This means you are making $10/100 hands and probably playing about 100 hands an hour at 6 max so you are making $10/hr. If you can add another table, but this causes your win rate to drop to 7bb/100 since you are not able to pay as close attention, you are now playing 200 hands per hour and your overall win rate is 14bb/hr or $14/hr which is a 40% increase over playing just one table at a time.
At some point in time adding another table will actually hurt your hourly win rate. If you go from six tables at 5bb/100 to eight tables at 2bb/100 you are dropping from 30bb/hr to 16bb/hr and should step back to six tables. Of course you want to put in enough time with a given number of tables to get a statistically significant sample size. Generally you want to have logged at least 50,000 and more ideally 100,000 hands under a set of circumstances to get an accurate win rate. Your comfort level is also important.
You should take into account the amount of fatigue that playing many tables at a time can induce. If you are able to play eight tables at a time but only for an hour, you’re only going to be getting 800 hands in (if playing short handed). If you are able to play four tables at a time for five hours before you get mentally exhausted you will be getting in 2,000 hands and not get burned out on poker as fast.
One tool that makes multi-tabling much easier is a Heads-Up Display, or HUD for short. A HUD displays vital statistics on your opponents directly on the poker table. This allows you to quickly analyze their style of play and adapt accordingly. With all this extra information available to you, you will be able to make better decisions in less time. If you are making better, faster decisions this gives you more available time to make decisions at other tables improving your quality of play and your win rate.
Another tool that can be extremely helpful is a table manager. Table managers keep your tables organized on your screen so that they are in an easy to navigate layout without having any tables hidden beneath another. They are customizable so that you can choose exactly where you want tables to go. Some are even able to open new tables themselves and perform such operations as buying in and automatically posting blinds.
A close cousin to the table manager is table selection software. Table selection software allows you to analyze the fishiness of a table based on the data you have stored in a tracking database such as PokerTracker. This allows you to avoid the tables with many good regular players and focus on tables that have new or bad players. Practicing good game selection can greatly increase your win rate and table selection tools make this process much easier than doing it manually.
To find the poker tools that will best help you improve your multi-tabling experience I recommend visiting Poker Software where you can find full reviews of many kinds of poker software.
Multi-tabling can be a huge benefit to you as an online poker player. It takes a lot of trial and error to find exactly what system works best for you, but the highly hourly win rate is worth it. Experiment with playing multiple tables and try different helper programs. In the end your bankroll will thank you!
