Multi tabling...Can you play the players or is it purely cards and situations?

^^^

You need a HUD to multi-table effectively. You can then play your opponent based on his/her stats.

Also if you play limits where there are a lot of regs you get to know their games so you don't even need the HUD. But yeah I'm currently 18-tabling and I definitely play the player as well. Granted I have to make a lot more assumptions I wouldn't have to make if I were 1-4 tabling, but general hand-reading skills are similar. I assume a 14/12 is able to fold top pair to 3 barrels and a 40/2 isn't folding top pair ever. Just little assumptions like that where if I were paying more attention I could get a better read than using preflop stats for postflop characteristics.

I find that if I multi-table I never seem to make money so now 90% of the time I only play one table... this is usually advised as you have 100% of your attention on the game itself.

No matter how maney tables you play at (ONE is the prefered amount) you should not only play the player, but play their and your positions, even more so than the cards you hold!

Are there not stats that tell you these things as well? I remember people posting about stats such as % fold to double barrel, etc.

Turn & river stats require a hell of a lot of hands to become reliable. Also, it takes time to fetch stats that are not directly in your HUD but that you access through a popup.

Having a few models of typical player behaviors based on a few fast converging stats and only relying on advanced stats for very tricky decisions or post-play analysis/note taking is a sensible approach.

I find that I can play both the player and cards very well with 4-6 tables, obv the more tables you add the less time you have to make decisions and reads. Above 9 tables I can still play the player occasionally, once I go beyond that I play almost exclusively a postional/card game.

This basically. For those stats to become reliable it takes hundreds of hands. By that point I probably know their game well enough I don't need to use the stats (and I do my own study away from the tables of the regs, so if I've got over 1k hands on any one person you can bet I pretty much know the basics of their game).

Also, not exactly related, but I think the most under-rated stat is W$WSF. I use this personally to make sure I'm not giving up too much and try to keep it up around 45% (when I was just playing fit or fold it was low 30s and when I get into the lazy multi-tabling ABC c-bet once etc. it's ~39-40%). So recently whenever someone doubles or triple barells me and I feel I've turned my hand face up (ie a good hand-reader would figure me for a 1-pair hand like TPTK that I do have) I'll use that stat to make the decision. Someone in the high 40s is one who will use that information and try to steal the pot from me. Someone below 40 never will.