7 Tips On Multi Tabling Poker
How To Make More Money Multi-Tabling Online Poker
If you are serious about building a bankroll and making money playing online poker then you need to learn how to multi-table, and to do it well. Although multi-tabling won’t help a losing poker player, it would just help you lose more faster, for a winning poker player it can vastly increase the amount of money you win in the time you can play. Here are some tips to help you increase your multi-table winnings, whether you are an experienced poker player just trying to start playing more than one table at once, or a multi-tabling pro who is looking for anything to give you an extra edge.
Learn How Many Table Maximize Your Profit – Not everyone is the same, some people make the most money when they limit their attention to 4 tables, others are willing to put less focus on any single table, but play 20 or more at once. They point isn’t to play as many tables as possible it is to make the most money possible. For you to make the most money, you will need to find what your ideal number of tables to play at a single time is. The best way to do that is with a tool like Poker Tracker. Poker tracker will keep track of all your hands for you, your winnings, and the hours you play. Since you can filter the database by dates, the best thing to do is to spend a week playing a series of different number of tables at a time.
Spend the first week playing 4 tables, the second week 6 tables, the third week 8 tables, etc. Your goal is to get 1000-2000 hands in for each set of tables. You can then easily determine where you are making the most money per hour (which is not necessarily the most money per hand). After you get more experience multi-tabling, say you found you make the most money playing 6 tables and have been doing that for a month or two, you might want to rerun the experiment to find out if you have gotten better and can make more money playing more tables now.
Minimize Your Distractions & Chances For Error – Since you will be splitting your focus many ways, you want to minimize any other possible distractions that are in your control. What that means for online play is ignoring the other players. You can’t pick up tells from players online, and some of them will intentionally be trying to piss you off. Although you should be running a program to track and display their stats, you shouldn’t pay any other attention to them. What that means is you should turn off avatars, and turn off chat. If you aren’t going to talk to anyone, why bother wasting your attention reading their chat ?
Also why bother displaying bulky avatars when you can turn them off and fit more tables on the screen ? Minimizing your chances for error means turning on any poker room option that you can to help you quickly see your hand, and any action that comes to you. That means that you should always make sure the size of the pot and any bets are displayed numerically, trying to count online chips is a pain in the ass, it also means you should always use a 4 color deck. Many online poker players have lost large pots because they were using a two color deck, and didn’t realize that a flush possibility was on the board. Use a 4 color deck so you can quickly see suits and eliminate the chance you will make that mistake.
Use The Best Poker Tools To Help Your Game – When you play poker in a cardroom, it is just you and the other players. All you have to help you win is your mind. You have to remember how the other players play, calculate odds, and make the best decisions. Fortunately, online, you don’t have to do all that. You can use sophisticated computer programs to give you information and help you play your best game. One of the best poker programs that every online poker player should have is Poker Tracker. Head and shoulders above it’s competitors, poker tracker keeps track of all your stats, and all the stats of every opponent you play a hand against.
With it’s heads up display that puts a summary of the players play history above their name on your poker table, you can easily see how every one of your competitors is playing, even if you can’t remember what they did 2 hands ago. For multi-tablers, poker tracker is essential. You will have so many opponents that you simply can not remember how they all play. Additionally it is difficult to remember how a player plays a day or a week later when you might play against them again. Poker tracker gives you all the information you need and allows you to focus your attention on what you need to, namely playing more tables and making more money. Other tools that you can buy will calculate odds for you and give you recommendations on how to play.
Avoid Marginal Hands Which Require Complicated Post Flop Play – As a heads up player, you want to make the majority of your poker decisions preflop. You don’t want to be playing a lot of pots where you have to make complicated decisions on the flop, turn, and river. You want to avoid complicated decisions for two reasons, the first is that you won’t have enough information or time to make good decisions. Since you will be splitting your focus, you won’t be able to sit and think through all the possibilities for the hand, you will need to make a decision and go with it. Quick decisions increase your chance of making a mistake.
Mistakes cost you money, so you want to avoid putting yourself in situations that you can make mistakes. What that means is you want to tighten your hand selection when you are multi-tabling. A lot of marginal hands are profitable if you can read the other players, make bluffs, and make big lay-downs. But you want to avoid those marginal hands. Hands you want to play are classic good poker hands, big pairs, big aces, any pair from late position, and big or suited broadway cards. Hands that you want to avoid are weak aces, or small suited connectors.
Pay Close Attention To Position – When you aren’t focusing on a single game, position becomes even more important. Playing out of position puts you at a disadvantage. You are at even more of a disadvantage when you are multi-tabling and playing a hand out of position. If you flop a strong hand, you may bet every street and get called down by a better hand without realizes the danger your hand is in. If you multi-table with weak hands and play out of position, you are setting yourself to get your entire stack taken.
The solution is to decide which hands you will play from which positions in which situations. Making a chart of your playable hand range from each position and putting it by your computer for easy reference will help you decide which hands you should play. One easy thing that you can do to avoid playing weak hands from early position is to never be the first limper into a pot. If you are under the gun, or everyone folds around to you, always raise or fold. Raise if you have a good hand, fold with the rest. You can limp into a pot with certain hands, such as small pocket pairs, if other players have limped in ahead of you, but don’t be the first limper.
Set up an ergonomic playing environment With Multi Tabling Poker – At some point or another, most poker players realize that they can make more money if they can play more hours. For an online multi-tabler, this can lead to long stretches playing poker with only short breaks. While that can make you a lot of money, you can find yourself in a situation that many office workers do, namely carpal tunnel syndrome or back pain or similar problems stemming from sitting at a desk all day.
If you play a lot of poker, but it hurts you to play, you won’t be able to play as well and it will cost you money. So if you get serious about playing online poker, you need to set up and ergonomic playing environment. Go to your office store and invest in a good chair, a good desk, dual monitors, a good mouse, and any thing else that will make your playing easier. Reinvesting some of your poker winnings into the equipment you need to continue winning poker is a good strategy that should pay off in the long run.
Set Up Tiled Multi Poker Tables – How you set up the tables on your screen is important. The best way to set up the tables is by tiling them across your screen. If you are playing 3 tables, then tile the tables in a 3 by 3 matrix. If you are playing 12 tables, go with a 4 by 3 matrix. Tiling the tables, as opposed to cascading the tables and just making a decision on whichever table pops up, allows you to see what is happening at all the tables all the time.
Tiling the tables allows you to see and understand the flow of every table. You can see big hands as they come up and understand who is running good at each table, and who is tilting. Finally, by tiling the Multi Tabling Poker, instead of cascading all your poker tables, you avoid the risk of playing a poker hand preflop, making a decision on another table, and having the first table disappear on your screen right when the flop comes and you need to continue playing the hand.