The Case For MultiTabling- People unfamiliar with the concept of mutltitabling see it as a waste of time and resources; why spread out your focus from one tournament or cash table to a wide range of tables, thus diminishing your ability to concentrate on player tendencies and patterns and reduce your overall profitability? The easiest way to defuse that argument is looking at your expected profit from a single table, and what happens when you stretch that profit out over multiple tables. lets' say that, in a $5/$10 limit game, your expected win rate is a very respectable 2 big bets per hour, or $20. Now, let's say that, in your trials with 4 tabling $5/$10, your win rate suffers a bit, and you're only winning at a rate of 1 big bet an hour per table. Even though your actual win rate per table is halved, the fact that you can play four tables at once actually doubles your hourly rate at those stakes, making multitabling far and away the superior option between single and multitabling.

Things to prepare for when multitabling- Firstly, there's a big, big difference between multitabling cash and multitabling tournament. If you want to run 6 tables of cash, and you suddenly need to use the bathroom, take a call, or whatever, you can just sit out of all the tables at no real penalty to you. Tournaments, however, generally have a designated break period (on most major sites now, the period is the last 5 minutes of the hour) meaning that, if something comes up, you're putting multiple tournaments at risk. Realize also that if things get deep in a few major tournaments, and you get down to heads up in two or three at once, you're looking at constant decisions for big sums of money at every click. Spacing out your tournament docket into clusters of tournaments can really save your butt when you could run deep in a major event; try to never bog yourself down with more than 4-6 tournaments at a time if you think you're going deep in one of your current events.

Playing multitablers- As with all tendencies of poker players, multitabling can be exploited against, as well. If you're at a cash table and see a player 8 tabling cash tables as well, realize that has decision process is likely to be much more streamlines and to the point than a single or two tabling player. He usually has lines in place for what he's going to do after every hand he participates in, and these are easily notated things like "continuation bets 100% of the time when he opens" or "never opens UTG without top 3 hand" and so on. By paying careful attention to the multitablers at your specific table, you can easily find patterns that they've been trained to follow (usually because these patterns are profitable against unobservant players) and exploit them severely with bluffs and aggressive actions designed to throw them off of their nearly robotic game.