From as far back in my poker career as I can remember, I’ve always played more than one table at once. I vaguely recollect bringing up the lobby on the tiny euro site that I began my addiction on and noticing that there were two tables of 5c/10c running and quickly decided that I should split up the 10 euros I’d deposited and play on 2 tables instead of one, after all, double the tables, double the profit right? Needless to say, I learnt a lot that day about how quickly one could lose 10 Euros.
When I first started grinding PLO8 I’d taken a step down from my usual stakes of NL25 to PL10. I’d read enough by this stage to know that to attain a similar hourly rate as before I’d have to play more tables of the lower stakes games, so made the decision to 8-10 table my new game. Like before, it was a steep learning curve, almost as steep as my losses column. It took weeks of practice before I even felt remotely comfortable playing that many games and even then I was still struggling to make correct profitable decisions in that short period between the table popping up and Pokerstars delivery that horrible siren that even to this day gets me a little tilted.
Now this was at the “beginning” of my poker career, around a year ago. 6 months ago I started grinding the NLHE Sngs and began 4-6 tabling them. Even with a decent ROI in these games, the hourly rate is going to be miniscule if you don’t mass table them. I took some tips from a few players in the stable and worked my way up quickly to playing around 20-30 simultaneously. This may sound like a lot but if you think about it, it’s not that hard. While you’re loading up all the games, you’ll only be playing the early stages where the blinds are very small and you’re playing extremely tight, or at least that’s how I play them, and by the time you get down to the deep end, you’ve busted more than half your games and you’re essentially playing 10 orso full ring push/fold games, requiring little to no real thought, once you’re comfortable in the games of course. So in essence, it was easier than multi-tabling my 6 max PLO8 games.
So there you have a small history lesson, if anyone ever decides to take a class on how I’d risen through the micro ranks to become the most profitable poker player on the planet (lol), but it’s not really a discussion piece. I admire those who 24 table the games comfortably, by that I mean not nitting it up and slowly bleeding away money and essentially becoming a rakeback pro, but never thought it was going to be something I’d do myself. But the other day I watched a video by frosty012 that he’d posted on his blog a while back.
If you watch the video you notice that he’s not frantically clicking buttons, timing out on tables or haemorrhaging money, he just makes it seem easy. Now, granted he is playing FR NLHE which doesn’t exactly require a huge amount of involvement, or at least compared to 6 max PLO8, but it still gets me thinking about my TableNinja configuration and even my general layout. It’s well and good going over HHs and working on my game, but maybe profit isn’t all dependant on how well you play poker. Like in the same way a good player with bad bankroll management will not succeed in the long run, I think a player with a bad grinding setup will not succeed either. I’m eager to see what others think about this so please drop me a comment or IM me about the subject, or anything else for that matter. I’m playing around with my setup at the moment but for now I’m going to try frosty’s idea of stacking my tables and using TN to bring selected tables out of the stack when I’m involved in a pot, even though he mentions that he doesn’t usually do that while he plays. I’m also going to try the Stack and Tile program and see if that suits my style better. Obviously it would be helpful to get another monitor involved so I’ll hopefully be getting one of those sorted soon.
So, there’s another quite pointless blog post to relieve the boredom for some of you, even if I’ve just put you a little deeper into your coma. Later y’all.
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