You have to be prepared to sacrifice EV to mass table
The definitions of mass tabling differ from one person to the next and what may seem like multi-tabling playing eight tables would be mass tabling to another. My own personal record of tables is twelve and so this feels like mass tabling to me but I also know that it isn’t as some players play far more than that. So this article is designed for players who want to make their money playing as many tables as possible with the best rake deal and bonuses that they can get. The fact of the matter is though that you need to get your head around the fact that you will play poorer poker when you play more tables.
The concept of playing as many tables as possible is one that has great potential when you are playing for bonuses and for rakeback but playing Texas Hold em poker on a lot of tables is really a skill in itself. It took me a long time to realise this because I spent too long trying to play my normal game on ten tables at once and you simply get yourself into too much trouble because of your own style. Let us look at an example here to show you what I mean. It has been folded to the cut-off who opens to $3 in a NL100 game and you hold the A-J. Now you three bet to $9 and the blinds both fold and your opponent calls.
The flop comes 9c-8d-5s and with $19.50 in the pot your opponent bets $14. Now if you were single tabling and had a good sample size on this player then you may start delving into your PokerTracker stats and using your time bank to see if this player likes to donk bet into pre-flop three bettors. If you find a reliable pattern over a decent sample size then you can exploit that by either calling and then looking to take the pot away on the turn or to raise the flop straight away. But when you are playing so many tables at once then you simply do not have the time to do this. So you have to revert back to a default line and that is to simply fold the hand.
This line loses EV if you had spotted a more productive line that could have made you money. Once we start to look at the usual metric of ptbb/100 then it is clear that you are going to be making less bb/100 as a result of playing worse poker. However this should be offset or at least you should be trying to offset that by a large amount of volume. You simply have to try and get used to playing in an automatic style of you want to successfully multi-table.
Many people miss the boat here because they try to master playing one table first before they try two or more. There is nothing wrong in this but you really do need to explore other areas of poker. The ability to multi and even mass table and acquire rakeback and sign up bonuses has given birth to a whole new breed of professional poker players in the online environment and that is the “rakeback pro”.