Multi-tabling has become the preferred way of playing online poker for the regular online players; poker players who happily play with 2,4,8 or even 16 tables open. Typically though, most players tend to play 2, 3, or 4 tables at once to allow a good balance between concentration time per table and to avoid making mistakes or being timed out when too many tricky decisions are needed at the same time.

The advantages of multi-tabling…

The main reason for multi-tabling is to increase a player’s average hourly win rate. If you are a consistent winner at, say, a $100NL buy-in table, then you can imagine how much more you could potentially win per hour by playing 2 tables at once instead of just 1. Now imagine opening up 3 or 4 tables at once. It all seems pretty simple, open up some more tables and you could be doubling, tripling or even quadrupling the amount you are currently winning per hour. However, there is one important factor that we have to take into consideration before assuming that things are this simple. We have to take into account that fact that our play will deteriorate for every extra table we sit down at.

Every time we multi-table we can assume that the amount we expect to win every hour from each individual table will decrease. This is because our attention is now going to be divided between two or more separate tables, whereas we would be able to focus all of our concentration on one table if we were not multi-tabling. It will be more difficult to pick up reads on players because we will normally be too busy making our plays on one table to analyse the plays of our opponents on another.

However, this is not necessarily such a bad thing, because there is still a good chance that we will be making more money overall. Say for example when we play $100NL one table at a time we win $8 per hour, and when we play two tables at a time we win $5 on each of the individual tables. Therefore overall we will be making $10 per hour multi-tabling instead of $8, which means an extra profit of $2 per hour.

The biggest problem with multi-tabling for extra profit is finding the optimum number of tables to give us the biggest win rate per hour. If we play one table at a time we will win a smaller amount than if we multi-table, but if we play at too many tables at a time then our win rate per hour on each of the tables could decrease so much that we win less than if we were playing at one table at a time. There is some middle ground here where the graph of our win rate per table meets the number of tables being played at to provide us with an optimum win rate. This is usually between 2 and 4 tables for the majority of online players.

Multi-tabling strategy.

The best strategy for multi-tabling is to play standard ABC poker, where you bet your strong hands and fold your weak hands. It is difficult to find enough time whilst playing multiple tables to be able to make any tricky or advanced plays. If you try too hard trying to analyse the styles of each of the players at the tables you will simply become too exhausted and your ability will deteriorate even further. Just think of your opponents as robots and play a solid style of poker against them. You are not going to be able to outsmart all of them all of the time, but if you play better than the majority of them every time you sit down at the table, then you will be a winner in the long run.

Another reason why people decide to play multiple tables at once is to reduce the boredom of having to wait been playing hands. Players can become accustomed to the fast style of Internet play and so the wait been playing hands may become frustrating after a while. This frustration can sometimes lead to players loosening their starting hand requirements just to subdue the boredom, which is not a profitable way to play. So in some cases it can be beneficial to play more than one table at a time to prevent yourself from entering too many pots and throwing away money on hands that you should never have played in the first place.