My cold is officially almost over!

To celebrate, I went to the gym this morning and probably caught another cold by riding my bike through the freezing morning temperatures. Starting the week with a workout is a tradition that I’m pretty happy with, anyway. Gives me energy.

I’m starting to seriously feel the need for a new monitor at home. Specifically, I’d like the exact model that I have at work: A 19″ Dell Ultrasharp. There are a few good reasons for this, and some that are not so good:

1. I want a flatscreen monitor because the old one takes up so much space (decent reason)
2. My computer only has DVI output, so I should get a monitor that has DVI input (bad reason - I have a converter)
3. I want to be able to fit four poker tables on the screen so I don’t have to alt-tab between them and miss important things (good reason)
4. I have video games that would look super awesomely cool if I had a better monitor (decent reason)
5. Gosh darnit, I’m worth it (very good reason)

This - quite intentionally, thank you very much - brings me to today’s topic: Multitabling.

Online poker allows you to play more than one table, more than one type of poker and even more than one site at the same time. I can play a tournament at PokerStars, three limit hold’em cash games on FullTilt and a SnG on Titan, at the same time, theoretically. Although I think it’s fairly uncommon that people play three different sites at the same time, it’s definitely not rare to see someone play more than three cash game tables simultaneously. There are even people who play more than 8.

I play 3. First and foremost because 3 is an amount that I feel I can handle and still make a good profit, secondly because I can’t fit more on my monitor. I would play more if I could, because I know I can beat the limit that I’m playing, so adding another table (where I’m folding 4 times out of 5 preflop anyway) only means that my profit/hour goes up.

But there are some other reasons why playing several tables might be good, that are less-than-obvious. Consider these two:

* I play three times as many hands as I normally would. This means that the interesting scenarios - with the complicated decisions - occur three times as often as they otherwise would have, giving me in effect thrice the opportunities to learn from them. Experience, ohoy!

* There’s no part of me that’s screaming for action and make me do stupid things like call with marginal or poor hands just to “play”. There’s usually something going on at one of the tables, so folding preflop is not a decision I hesitate to make.

There are downsides, of course. Perhaps the most obvious one is that I don’t get as good reads on people as I otherwise would have. PokerTracker goes a long way, but specific details about someone’s play is something I miss out on. I generally don’t watch the table at all unless I’m involved in a hand there. This, however, has a sort-of upside to it: I don’t learn as much from the hand as I would have if I had stayed focused on what happened after I folded, but I don’t fall into the trap of being results-oriented either. Finding out that you folded the winning hand on the flop can make you question your own play, even if it was correct. Not ever finding out that you actually would have won money is therefore a mixed blessing.

All things put together, I feel playing multible tables has advantages that far outweigh the disadvantages, and the really big one is the amount of experience you can squeeze into a relatively small timeframe.

But, and this is a big one, you really need to know that you’re a winning player on a single table before you start playing at a second one simultaneously. Otherwise, you’re just adding to your losses.

/FP