Why Mass Multi Tabling is Bad for Your Game

How to play the optimal number of tables

There are a number of reasons to look at why playing too many tables can hurt your game, but the main reason is the swings of the game.

If you are playing 16-20 tables or more at once you really aren’t focusing in on certain players at the table. What you are doing is looking at the cards and making a decision to raise or fold from there on.

With 20 tables opened at once you can lose focus or go into an autopilot mode and go on tilt almost instantly if you are disturbed by someone or something. This is where you can go on extreme tilt and lose control over what you are doing at the table.

To be able to effectively mass multi table is a skill that almost no people can sustain for long periods of time. There are a few out there who either make their money from rake back or can actually play 20 or so tables and show a profit.

How many tables can you handle?

The best way to gauge how many tables you can handle at once is to see how much money versus how much time you spent playing. You want to look at the scenario where you will turn the highest profit in the shortest period of time.

This for most players is between 4-8 tables. If you can handle more and slowly work your way up to a higher threshold of tables then great, but the swings will kill your bankroll some days. The more tables you play at once the more hands you see, but this can be a bad thing and turn in to a really bad thing in a hurry.

The repetitive nature of playing poker and trying to constantly improve will blow up someday in your face when you run bad or are having a bad day. It is inevitable to run bad for some stretch of time. It happens to everyone.

One way to make sure that you are running bad and not playing bad is to cut down the amount of tables you play. If you are playing 20 tables most times you will not see if you won the hand or what your opponent had, you will just see that you either have more chips or have less.

A better way to look at this is to study your opponents by playing 4 tables and make informed decisions instead of reaction bets to the board. Often times if you sit at 4 tables you can pick off the mass multi table player bluffs rather easily.

All of the mass multi table players go on tilt at some point during the day if they are putting in a lot of hours. The key for them is to run good at that point of the day. There are some players out there who can play for 20 hours and not go on tilt, but it is human nature if you start to lose to try and get it back as fast as possible.

Mass multi tabling is not for everyone.

Is multi-tabling for you?

It can devastate a bankroll in a short period of time. It can cause a normal player to go on tilt in a short matter of time. It doesn’t allow you to look at how certain players are playing at different tables.

It is not something that will help you gain a greater knowledge of the games you want to succeed at. In the long run starting off slow in poker is what you should do.

Start with one table, then two, then 4, and add another table as you see fit. Slowly but surely is what poker is. Poker is a lifelong game and you shouldn’t be in a rush to get to its conclusion.

If you want to be good at multi-tabling, pokerstars is one of the best choice, as they have the traffic to enable true mass (or more modest) multi-tabling. Because they always have dozens of active tables at any of the low and mid stakes you can choose from. This is what the supernova elite players love about it.

Good luck with your poker goals.

Not all poker rooms are made equal and the poker professionals know it. There are more multi-tablers at pokerstars than any other poker room as PokerStars is the online poker room with the largest selection of active tables at most stake levels including up to NL1000 and higher.