Mass multi tabling

Poker Strategy / Marcus Bateman / 11 February 2010 / Leave a Comment

Mass multi tabling refers roughly to playing ten tables or more at once. In the most extreme cases, some players have taken this ability to well over twenty tables at once, and here I want to look at the pros and cons of such a strategy, and some tips on how to achieve it if you feel it is right for you.

Just like any business, poker is a game where you endlessly try and weight up profit versus turnover. The more tables you play, the less you can focus on the players around you, which gradually decreases profit (as you can make fewer and fewer read specific plays), but drastically increases the turnover of hands. The less tables you play, the lower your turnover of hands, but the greater your profit on each hand.

Because of this, you are often better off trying to mass multi table a lower stake that you can easily beat, than trying to play one table at a higher stake that you may struggle with. If you can ten table $.50/$1 and win at a rate of two big blind per hundred hands, you are better off doing that than playing a single table of $5/$10 if you can only beat that at one big blind per hundred hands.

Mass multi tabling requires some substantial adjustments to your game though in order to succeed. You have to tighten up - it is simply impossible to play a loose aggressive style over that many tables simultaneously. It is also crucial to start off playing nine handed games. Six handed poker is a much more complex and loose game than nine handed games, and just like playing loose aggressive, is very hard to do en masse.

A poker HUD is also a very useful tool, allowing you to keep track of the players at your table without having to constantly read through hand histories. A final point which really helps is to just layer your tables together instead of trying to tile them. You will not be able to keep up with the information presented to you, so it is better to just have a table flash up when it is your turn to act and go from there.

Mass multi tabling can hugely increase your profits if pulled off well. It is also an invaluable skill to have, as it keeps you highly focussed when you play, a point that can pay big dividends when trying to break into tougher games at the higher stakes. Ease yourself into it gently, and you might just find that you can play more games that you ever imagined possible.

Warning: This article is intended for people used to playing at least 6-8 tables at once. Do not try and jump into this sort of play without a gradual build up in the number of games you play at once - without prior experience it will nearly always back fire. For articles on how to start off multi tabling, check out these.

Multi-tabling
Tips on increasing the number of tables you can play