Single Tabling vs. Multi-tabling

If you played only one table and really paid attention to everything that was going on and all of the table dynamics, you might win at say 4 big blinds per 100 hands (bb/100). Let’s imagine you then moved to playing 4 tables and because your attention was not fully on each table your winrate dropped to 3bb/100. If, for argument’s sake each table yields 100 hands per hour then you would be making 4bb and 12bb per hour respectively.

It stands to reason then that if you play a tight solid strategy which can attain these win-rates, you should still be able to win at perhaps 1bb/100 over 16-20 tables depending on how quick your reactions are. That equates 16-20 bb/hr! Sure, you might not be playing as optimally as the guy playing one table, but you’re making a lot more money.

Hands per Hour

In truth on most sites, you’ll net about 80 hands per hour per table playing 6 handed games, which for 16-20 tables meaning you’ll be hitting 1200-1600 hands per hour. 1200 hands an hour is 20 a minute. You might think that is an awful lot of hands, but you’re going to be playing tight, folding more than 80% of your hands, so now you’re only really playing 4 hands a minute. About half of hands will end on the flop, so you’re really only going to be left with 2 hands that go to the turn and/or river every minute.

Smoothly adding tables at the start of a session so you’re up to your maximum capacity as quickly as possible is a skill in itself. You don’t want to be in a situation where it takes 15 minutes to get playing on 16 tables if your session is only going to last for an hour. This would result in your hourly hand rate being reduced significantly.

To make the ramp-up and ramp-down of your sessions less of a factor, you should play in 2 hour blocks. This way if it takes say 7 minutes to get seated at all of your tables and 3 minutes to close them all down as you play each one until your due to pay the big blind, you would only be ramping for 1/12 of the time, whereas with one hour sessions this number would be 1/6 and your rand hate would be degraded.

Another consideration in maximizing your hourly hand rate is where to play. For Pokerstars and Party Poker and fantastic table management tool called Table Ninja exists which makes mass tabling much easier by allowing you to assign hotkeys to certain actions and to have pre-set bet amounts typed into the bet window for you for all points in the hand.

As well as this function, it allows for much easier opening and closing of tables and handles a lot of the multiple click annoyances which you need to do but don’t have time for when you already have many tables open. Remember, the more hands you play for hour, the quicker you can clear the deposit bonuses offered by the sites which you play on.

The Long Run

Making consistent money at poker is all about volume and solid play. You really need to be playing well over a million hands a year if you want all the luck to even out. This is something that escapes even very good players. The long run is extremely long. You can have long stretches where you are crushing the games, everything is going right for you and you think you’re going to be playing high stakes in no time. By the same token you have stretches where nothing goes right, every call you make is incorrect and every bluff you try to pull off is called.

After a few weeks of this you completely doubt everything you know about poker, think the game has passed you by and consider retirement. However, the truth about whether you’re destined for high stakes or retirement plays out over a much longer time scale than most of us can easily deal with emotionally. This is another great benefit to mass-tabling and churning out huge volumes of hands. It’s like having a time machine that spares you the pain!