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www.We have already spoken about the biggest errors and mistakes when multi-tabling. Nevertheless, we believe that every successful Sit and Go, Double or Nothing or MTT player must master multitabling in order to increase his hourly wage at online poker significantly. In this poker strategy article, we give you tips on how you can play more tables and increase your profit per hour.
Benefits of Multitabling SNG Tournaments
But let us first have a quick look at the main benefits of multi-tabling:
Higher hourly wage: You don’t want to maximize your ROI in tournaments, you want to maximize the dollars you earn per hour. Therefore, you have to measure your success with your hourly rate and not with your ROI. Playing at more tables simultaneously can significantly increase your hourly wage.
Bonus is cleared faster: In addition to earning more, you clear your bonus faster when playing more games at the same time. This boosts your effective hourly wage further. We recommend you to try to always clear a bonus when playing online poker. Have a look at our list of exclusive poker bonus offers now.
Lower perceived variance: The variance itself is not dependent on the number of tables that you play at the same time. But many poker players take note only of the negative side of variance: They complain about downswings. In general, your ROI will be lower while multitabling: you have less thinking time per action and you can give each table and opponent less attention. And the closer your ROI gets to 0%, the greater is the likelihood of long downswings. But the perceived variance while multitabling will be lower: because you play so many more tournaments, a normal downswing might last only a few days instead of several weeks
Less boredom: More tables mean more action. Especially in the early stages of a tournament you will play very few hands. Due to the frequent folding, you will usually be only a spectator in a hand. If you play at multiple tables, you will be involved more frequently in a pot, making SNG tournaments more interesting.
With these advantages, it is clear that you should try to multitable SNG’s and other poker tournaments. Now read the best tips for effective multi-tabling.
Multitabling Tip 1: The Optimal Number of Tables
As we said before, your goal while multi-tabling is to maximize your hourly wage. And surely you know that with each additional table that you play, your winnings per table will drop. So you want to optimize and not maximize the number of tables. Consider this fictional example of a player who is grinding $22 regular SNG’s which last an average of 40 minutes:
With each additional table, the ROI decreases by 1% in this example. While the ROI is 17% for single-tabling, for five simultaneous tables it is only 13% and with 18 tables the ROI is 0%. From 19 tables on, our player in the example will even lose money because he is overwhelmed by the number of tables (which leads to frequent time-outs, missing clicks and wrong decisions).
You see that in this example, the optimal number tables is nine. When multi-tabling Sit and Go’s at nine tables simultaneously, the hourly wage is the highest with $26.7. Therefore, try to figure out at which number of tables your wage is highest.
Multitabling Tip 2: Play SNG Tournaments Consecutively
As you gain more and more experience, try to move from playing Sit and Go’s in “sets” to “continuous play”. In a set you start e.g. eight tables and play them all over. Only after you have finished your last table, you start a new set of 8 tables. In the continous play, you play continuously at the same time 8 tables. With this strategy, wou will manage to play a significantly larger number of tournaments per hour. You are not convinced? Then read our tips on “Playing SNG in sets or continuously“.
Multitabling Tip 3: Best Table Arrangement
Sure you’ve heard that you can arrange your online Sit and Go tables in several ways: tiled, cascading or as a stack. If you play only a small number tables simultaneously, it makes sense to arrange them in a tiled fashion all next to each other so that you can follow the action at all tables. If you multitable eight, twelve or even more tables, you should switch to a “cascading” or “stacked” table arrangement. Read more here about the optimal arrangement of the tables for multitablers.
Multitabling Tip 4: Don’t Play Marginal Hands
In the early phase of a tournament, you should fold all marginal hands. In Texas Hold’em, the largest part of the profits in poker is made with only very few starting hands. At a full ring table, only 18% of all starting hands are profitable. So why should you put your survival in a tournament at risk with a marginal hand like ace-seven suited or a pair of threes in early position? Marginal hands also require much more attention after the flop than simple hands like a pair of aces, a pair of kings or ace-king.
Multitabling Tip 5: Use Poker Tools
From a certain number of tables – this may be the four tables for one player and twelve tables for another player – the use of tools such as Holdem Manager or Poker Tracker becomes essential. These poker tools have a heads-up display (HUD), which shows you live statistics of your opponents. For sure you will not remember an opponent with which you were playing three weeks ago while playing a set of twenty Sit and Go’s. The tracking software, however, forgets nothing and will show you what type of player is currently sitting on seat 3 at table 7.
Multitabling Tip 6: The Perfect Poker Monitor
If you start earn large and larger sums of money while playing online poker, you should think about buying yourself a bigger monitor. Multitabling on two screens or on one large monitor is much easier than multi-tabling on a screen with the size of a netbook or an iPad.
Multitabling Tip 7: Avoid Distractions
If you play poker for real money, then you should take this game as serious as any other job. Therefore, you should minimize the chances of getting distracted. This means that you should put away your mobile phone, turn your phone off and switch the TV off as well. While playing on your PC, you should only open those software programs that you need for playing online poker (therefore: close Facebook, Skype and all the other potential distractions).
Secondly, you should adjust the poker tables so that they minimize distractions and so that you can focus exclusively on the cards and your opponents. Therefore, we recommend you
- to turn off the chat feature
- to turn off avatars
- to use the four-color deck
Multitabling Tip 8: Watch your Health
Multitabling is hard, strenuous work. Not only for your brain, but also for your body. Hours of persistence in the same position is not good for your back, your hands and your eyes. Typical “diseases of multitabling poker players” are back pain, problems with the eyes and inflamed tendons.
Multitabling Tip 9: Best Poker Room for Multitabling
Multitabling at many tables is only possible if your poker room has enough active players and if the software is stable. Which is the best poker room for multi-tabling? The online professional poker player Boku87 ought to know. He had managed to increase a bankroll of $100 to $10,000 within two weeks. Boku87 played at the same time poker tournaments on 30, 40 or even at 50 tables. This is only possible in one poker room – the largest online poker room of the world: PokerStars. Sign up now at PokerStars and get the maximum bonus of $600 with the PokerStars Marketing Code psp13368!
