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Once you have grasped the basics of tournament poker and started to show a profit, multi-tabling is a logical step for most people as they look to boost their profits.  Along with a greater hourly rate, effective multi-tablers also greatly reduce variance as they put in more volume over the same time period.

Here are some tips on how to multi-table more effectively:


Take It Slowly

Playing many tables at once will definitely make winning players more money.  However, if you are a losing or break-even player, then multi-tabling will simply eat into your bankroll faster.  If you are struggling to beat the game then you are best to spend your time working on your game and plugging those leaks before you attempt to play more than 1-2 tables.  Once you do start to add more tables on, it is best to only add 1-2 tables at a time, until you feel comfortable and can look to add another 1-2.  From 1-tabling $5 sit and go tournaments it took me just over a year until I was comfortably 16-18 tabling MTT’s and maintaining my ROI at a reasonable level.


Minimize Distractions

The ultimate key to multi-tabling poker well is to make great decisions in the shortest time possible.  Our first job is to get the relevant information on each hand as efficiently as possible to cut down our total decision making time.  Even a fraction of a second delay per hand will add up playing many tables over a session.  To this end I will eliminate all visual distractions from the screen that don’t give me key information I need to make good decisions.  Some examples of this including disabling avatars/pictures, having a plain blue screen background rather than a colorful picture and selecting dull mono-colored table images.  Having all non-alert sounds and animation turned off further reduces distractions.  For each site you play on you should have all of the table options set as similarly as possible to increase your speed in acting on the table.  When you are reaching the limits of your multi-tabling capabilities, having the music and TV off is a must to give 100% focus to the alert sounds and making sure you are not missing any hands.


Organize Your Screen

Once you begin increasing the number of tables, it becomes harder to instantly recognize what tournament you are playing and how this might affect your decision.  Efficiently organizing your screen in a manner that works for you will definitely help you as you attempt to add more tables.  Personally, I like to have the tournaments I am deepest in on the left of my screens and progress through to the tournaments that have just started on the right.  When I have spare time between hands I can then observe the tables on the left, the ones I am deep in, to get betting patterns or other tells from hands I am not involved in.  I also know I am more likely to be short stacked on the left.  Hands like K-7 or J-8 are auto-folded on the right where I am deeper stacked, but may be shoved or re-shoved on the left depending on position and stack sizes. 

When I have a lot of rebuys in my schedule I like to put rebuy tourneys on the bottom of the screen and freezeouts on the top.  If there are a lot of freezeouts, like on a Sunday, I put the bigger buy-ins along the top of the screen and the smaller ones down the bottom.  Another good player I know likes to group his tournaments on his screen by site.  As each sites alert sound is different, this setup means he can quickly identify which site he has to act on and knows where to find the tables from that site on his screen.

Whatever your preference, having an organized table layout that gives you information about the tournament and the stage it’s in by the mere position of the table on the screen will certainly improve your multi-tabling capability.


Avoid Marginal Spots

There are several characteristics of what I believe is the best style of play for multi-tabling tournaments, but ‘avoiding marginal spots’ is probably the most important of them.  The style is about being very aggressive pre and post flop to either win the hand quickly or get out of it.  When you have up to 20 tables going at once, trying to slow-play hands, see flops and be a very tricky, trappy type of player is going to get you in trouble.  This may be a profitable style of play for you overall, but you will find it virtually impossible to replicate this on a large number of tables at once.  By coming into every pot either raising or re-raising you avoid those multi-way and multi-street hands that can be complicated and time consuming, taking your focus away from other tables.

Obviously you will lose some value in some spots with this style, but the benefit is by overall playing more tables you will win more money per hour, even if your ROI does drop slightly because of it.

A classic multi-tabling mistake I see often is players completing the small blind after limpers with suited or connected type hands like A-3s, 8-7 etc.  Even if the hand is laying you great implied odds to complete from the small blind, you will often hit the flop marginally with top-pair and a weak-kicker or have some type of draw.  For the rest of the hand you will be playing a marginal hand out of position in a multi-way pot which needs a lot of attention and good play to turn into a profitable spot.  If you are anywhere near full capacity in terms of number of tables running, then just fold these types of hands and turn your focus to the other tables.

A great habit to get into is not looking after you have acted.  Once you make your move there is no point watching other people act.  You can act on other tables then come back and pick up all the info you need to make your next decision.  Especially if you are all in, you can’t change what happens so you might as well act on other tables then come back later to see what happened.  Having this habit is essential if you wish to play 10+ tables effectively.

Never be afraid to add on a few extra tables and push your limits, but never be afraid to drop your numbers back down if you are not coping with the extra table.


All the best at the tables.

mathclub

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Triple Crown Winners


Recent Tournament Scores for mathclub

$15,810.00

$100 buy-in, $100,000 Gtd - 1 Rebuy on PokerRoom. 11/16/2008, 2 place for 15,810.00

$5,969.70

$30 buy-in, $20,000 Guaranteed Rebuy on TitanPoker. 11/20/2008, 1 place for 5,969.70

$5,500.00

$109 buy-in, $20K Gtd on PartyPoker. 11/02/2008, 1 place for 5,500.00

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