First of all this is usually done by pro's example: Jonathan little will play upwards of 15 tables at a time. Many poker coaches (also pro/semi pro) will do this. The reason as explained to me though I am probably misrepresenting the statement accurately is that you do this in order to reduce variance.
The players that do this consistently and have winning stats study this game and their
hands a lot. And take the game very seriously. One guy I know semi/pro studies and coaches many hours a week, upwards of 20 because he also has a full time job.
In addition, instead of just opening a ton of tables his approach is to have strategies in place that allow him to make decisions within seconds. Generally he plays his hands consistently, has a Hud and adapt when necessary depending on his opponents stats.
I don't remember the actual numbers he used but as it was explained in a webinar I was in, a winning player is going to lose x amount of time, and by playing this many games at a time cuts his variance quite a bit. I am not mentioning his name because I do not want to misrepresent what he stated to me but if you check out Johnathan little he discusses this somewhere in one of his webinars unfortunately I can't find the webinar after using google.
But the idea is to spend plenty of hours working on your game get more than just the fundamentals down, develop a strategy and then implement that strategy on more and more tables. You can start with two and move up from their as you get more comfortable.
This is from pokerology regarding stats and variance;
The realities are:
- Even the top pros only win tournaments less than 1% of the time. For some it was as low as 0.60%. So this means they are winning only 1 out of every 100 times. Of course variance doesn’t always come on schedule and they can go 200-300 tournaments without a win.
- Top pros only final table around 3% of the time. Some are as low as 2%.
- Top pros are only cashing about 13% of the time. This means they lose money 87% of the time they play! In fact, amateurs cash more often than pros. The difference is that when pros do cash, they cash deep more often.
pokerology