Poker Articles

By Fox | Published May 12 2005, 08:29 PM
I've been playing 3 or 4 tables of 2/4 or 3/6 limit hold em for the last couple days so I thought I'd write a little bit about it.

There are a few advantages of playing multiple tables that appeal to me. Playing 4 tables of 3/6 has the same win rate for me as playing one table of 10/20, but the variance is much lower. I haven't had an hour where I lose $300 at 4 tables of 3/6, but at a 10/20 table this can happen easily. As regular readers know I also frequently play for bonus money and make a nice profit from it. At 4 tables of 3/6 I actually collect raked hands for my bonuses about 6 times as fast as playing one table of 10/20 because many hands at a 10/20 table don't have big enough pots to be raked.

It's also nice to have hands popping up every few seconds demanding a decision. Not only is it very good for my game to see so many hands, but it keeps me from getting bored. I see aces about once every 45 minutes playing 4 tables, and a playable hand or an unraised blind every minute or two, so it's easy to stay real tight and solid.

My first piece of advice is to play a level that you know you can beat without knowing a great deal about the individual players. There are certainly people who beat the 5/10 NL games while playing 4 at a time, but I wouldn't try it until I was steadily beating those games one at a time. You'll want to try two tables for awhile before you go any higher and keep accurate records so that you know you are beating two tables before you go to three or four tables.

One of the best ways to keep those accurate records and also get some information about your opponents is tracking software like pokertracker or pokeroffice. I use pokertracker and gametime+ which gives me a fairly good idea what a player is like with a heads up display once I have a significant number of hands on them. Within 30 or 40 hands you get an idea about some players, and within 100 hands you have a fairly reliable picture of how most of the people at your table play. Check out pokertracker.com for some of the tools I use.

It is important to always keep records as you add to the number of tables you are playing so that you find out quickly if you are a winning player at two tables but losing money at four tables. Playing solid "ABC Poker" as we call it should get the money at anything below 4/8 on most sites, I know it does at Party Poker. If you haven't read Small Stakes Hold Em yet I highly recommend it for beating these small games, it's the best book I have found for beating low limit games.

In the last 13 hours of play I have made $190 with my play and collected $100 in bonus money from Empire, while taking very little risk. It's not Johnny Bax money, but it'll pay the bills. Of course I lost about a hundred a few days ago playing SNg's, but overall it's been a good week.

A few months ago I told a few of my friends that I had been writing up a tournament schedule and keeping track of upcoming reload bonuses for myself on a text file on my desktop and trying to be organized about the whole thing. "Cool email it to me" was the response, and they forwarded it around and now I am sending the list out to a bunch of people every night. If the overlays on BoDog start to be full you can blame me for part of that, the list has about 90 people on it at this point, and gets forwarded around to alot more than that.

I've gotten tired of sending off mass emails every night so I registered www.dailypokerlist.com a few days ago and I'll start putting the list up on the site for those of you who've been wondering where the emails were for the last few days. The site isn't costing me a nickel, and I won't be making a nickel off of it either, it's just an easier way to do things. There will be no ads, no forums, no articles or anything else, just a little list every day on a single page so don't expect much. Thanks to my buddy Dorf for hosting the site for free for me. There should be something up on it within the next few days so cut it out with the emails. I got 22 emails in the last 36 hours asking me where the list was, grrr.

That's all for this week, thanks for reading.

See you at the final table, Fox