Too Warm, Too Cold, and Just Right

I recently watched a friend play some very high-stakes Internet poker: He was playing two games at once, one a $100-$200 hold'em game and the other an $80-$160 Omaha eight-or-better game.

So much for my early thoughts/predictions that Internet poker wouldn't be climbing over the $20-$40 level anytime in the next few years. At least one of the two sites involved is allaying any collusion fears by having a full-time host watch over play. This isn't practical for 40 different tables, but if your site has only one $100-$200 game going, one host scrutinizing the action seems reasonable.

The first question I had for my friend was, "How can you play two games at once for such high stakes?" He laughed and pointed out several other well-known players in the games. "X (a clever pseudonym) plays four games at a time," he said, "and Y over there plays as many as eight at a time."

"Aside from slowing the action down, doesn't playing that many games cost these guys an edge?" I asked. "I tried playing just two games at once when I first started playing on the Internet, and eventually I gave it up. I couldn't study my opponents' tendencies as much as I wanted to, and lots of times it made it harder to remember how the action had gone in one game or the other."

Resisting the urge to explain why these difficulties made me a much better writer than player, my friend admitted that there could be a little something to this. "Yeah, sometimes I lose a little bit of information on one game because I'm playing two," he said, "but if my hourly rate per game suffers a little bit, my total win per hour from playing two games is still better than it would be for one, so I do it," he said.

My friend plays poker for a living, and he had identified the key issue for his "professional" approach to poker: He was playing the number of games that maximized his total hourly win rate, even if that meant he wasn't quite bashing each game for the maximum. As a pro, he wasn't concerned with non-cash matters like how much he was learning, or how much fun he was having. He looked directly at the bottom line.

When I made the decision to play one game rather than two or more, I was looking at my bottom line, also. In a setting where win rates are usually expressed in terms of big bets won per hour, with one big bet per hour nicely acceptable and two superb, I found that playing two games usually resulted in at least one mistake per hour. Sometimes these mistakes cost me merely one bet, and sometimes they cost me entire pots. While the "perfect poker player" might well have been able to play two or more games with nearly equal facility, my empirical experience had taught me that I wasn't the perfect Internet poker player.

If you play Internet poker, you face the same "Goldilocks" question: How many games are too many, how many are too few, and how many are just right … for your unique collection of skills, desires, and personality quirks.

"Hold the phone!" you might say. "What do you mean, 'desires and personality quirks'? I play poker for money, just like your 'professional' friend. I should play the number of games that maximizes my total win, shouldn't I?"

That's true enough if the only reason you play poker is for the money, but let's face it, if money were the only reason we all played poker, the overwhelming majority of us would be very unhappy people, because the very best players combine with the rake to make it difficult for most of us to win long term.

Reasons why people might play online other than their short-term financial results include, but are not limited to, using Internet poker as:

1. A learning experience for larger games or live games

2. A pleasant diversion from the day's activities

3. A way to fill up time in between other kinds of computer work

Playing two or more games at once isn't necessarily the best way to accomplish any of these goals, especially No. 1. People who are still living at the early part of the poker learning curve probably don't do themselves a favor by playing multiple games. A large part of the learning process for beginners and intermediates involves raising their awareness of many issues that experienced players take for granted, and it's hard to maintain that raised awareness when you're flying back and forth between games.

Sometimes a personality trait/quirk argues in favor of playing more than one game. Recently I was playing in a $5-$10 hold'em game at a new site. That's a bit lower than I like to play, but I was mostly interested in investigating software and the site interface under game conditions.

The game was amazingly tight for a $5-$10 game; it might have been $500-$1,000 for the relative lack of multiway action. My chip total refused to move much either up or down, and after a while I caught myself saying, "I couldn't win a big pot in this game if my life depended on it."

I quit playing, because such a statement is a sure sign of impatience, and impatience is a sure precursor to losing. Even though I had thought I was playing in order to investigate the site, my "action gene" seemed active, and this wasn't an action game.

Had I been playing in two games at once, the relative lack of action in this one game wouldn't have been nearly as big a problem, because I'd have another game to look to whenever I tossed my hand away in the tight game. If you know yourself to be the impatient type, you're probably in trouble as a poker player, but you can avoid some trouble by playing online in multiple games.

(Of course, someone who isn't happy with one tight $5-$10 game doesn't have to choose between quitting for the night and playing two games. He can always just switch tables, a matter that's often easier online than in a brick-and-mortar cardroom. Just because one $5-$10 game at a site is tight at the moment doesn't mean they all will be: Oftentimes, just one or two players can radically change a game's nature.)

Those players who know themselves to be impatient don't necessarily have to play two or more games, though. I know at least one player who does a lot of computer work at home, and can play one game in the background while he works. His need to spend most of his time on work dovetails nicely with the proper approach to poker: throwing most of his starting hands away. Each time he throws a hand away, he gets some work done … and he avoids getting involved with quite a few substandard starting hands that way.

Whether you play $0.25-$0.50, or $100-$200, there is an optimal number of online games for you. Take a long, hard look at precisely what you are trying to accomplish and why, and you'll soon enough figure out how many games you should be playing.