This post is prompted by some chat at my table today. One guy - a PokerStars regular who multitables and plays a whole lot - was asked how he could keep up with playing so many tables (I think it was 6 at the time) at once. “Don’t you misclick a lot?” The regular answered - and I’m paraphrasing to put it more succinctly- that his win-rate at 5/10 was so high that the money he lost due to the occasional misclick or mistake was more than made up for by adding another table.

I don’t know if you can see the fallacy in his reasoning, but it’s this: Your win-rate - or mine, or his - isn’t constant, like some poker interest earned on your bankroll. It’s the average return based on your actions. If you play 100 more hands per hour, but make more mistakes, your win-rate will no longer be what it was before you decided to add another table. It will go down. And here’s the real danger in this fallacy:

Unlike interest on a bank account, a win-rate can sink to the negative. Adding another table may turn a winning player into a losing one. It takes so little. Especially in limit hold ‘em - my game of choice, where the initial conversation took place - where the edges are so small.

I think there’s a dangerous trap in thinking that more hands means more money. It’s easy to sit back and look at your win-rate and deduce that if you play X hands this month, you’ll make $Y. There’s no explicit correlation there. I know the dangers of this trap because I’ve fallen for it myself a few times. It’s a really easy thing to do, and made even easier by the pesky bonus points (Stars FPPs, etc.) that are earned based on number of hands played. I mean, look at me - I’m putting in just enough time to make sure I maintain platinum star. At the end of a month (like now) that translates into grinding through a specific number of hands, not looking at the bigger picture and trying to profit as much as possible.

Because the money doesn’t automatically follow the hands played. When you look at your win-rate, you’re looking at how you’ve done on average in the past. It doesn’t necessarily say much about the future. So do what I’m trying to do (and not what I’ve often done) and focus on making the best decisions possible, not playing the most number of hands. For the beginning multi-tablers out there, I think this is an important perspective to keep.