I've noticed one consistent trend across all of my sessions since I started up a few days ago:

When I start a session I open 1 table, maybe 2 at max. I fully focus and put a lot of effort into trying to put opponents on hands, keeping track of which players are the fish, making sure every play I make has a purpose, etc... To combat the boredom while waiting for a good hand I read strategy articles and the forums. When a playable hand comes up I have no problem switching 100% of my attention away from reading and onto the table.

As soon as I open 3 or more tables, however, most of my ability to play sensibly goes out the window. I don't feel overwhelmed in principle. I'm good at using hotkeys, and with tight play I'm rarely ever *playing* three hands at once anyway. Yet having three tables open makes the playable hands come up that much more frequently, and it makes me feel like I'm playing that much faster. Playing faster gets me into a looser mentality, and I quickly find myself making stupid plays and bad calls just because I'm caught up in a stupid rush.

Every one of my sessions so far has gone like this:

1) Start out with 1 or 2 tables. Win a stack or two.
2) "I'm playing well, if I open more tables my hourly rate will go up!"
3) Open 3-5 tables.
4) Lose 3-4 stacks.
5) Go back to 1 or 2 tables
6) Painfully grind back up break-even for the rest of the day

Has anyone else experienced something like that? Those people who go and 16-table to grind it out, how they heck do they do!? They can't possibly be playing their solid A games when doing that. Or can they?

I find I can pay up to 4 tables, after that I get sticky with TPTK and begin to spew. So i stoped playing more than 4 tables.

What you've got is one of your personal mental leaks. Mentality is as important to poker as strategy. It doesn't matter how well you know the game if you stop thinking during a session.

So work on your discipline. Decide how many tables you want to play at the start of the session and never increase it part way. If you're handling two tables well then you can try three next session. But not during this one.

Set sensible parameters prior to play and then you'll know that if you feel the urge to deviate from it that that feeling isn't coming from a rational part of your brain and you should either ignore it or take a break until it passes.

For a long time I would only play like 3 or 4 tables but I've found that I personally play better with 6-10ish because it stops my FPS that happens when I'm semi-bore with less tables. I guess you have to experiment to find your sweet spot. It helps if you have a big bankroll for your stake too. Like I'm playing 10NL on 70ish buy-in's right now.

The amount of hands you are involved in isn't constant. If you play enough tables so that you are only "bored" for short amounts of time you will be overwhelmed a lot. By the same token, if you never, or only very rarely want to get overwhelmed you have to accept being "bored" a decent amount.

The solution is what you've already discovered. Fill in the downtime with something useful. Review big hands, follow hands you're not in and try to guess people's ranges, think about specific lines you want to take against some of your opponents, etc. Try to find something.

BTW, no one plays their A game all the time. That's an unrealistic expectation.

FOLD MORE

Then what? Am i gonna say look at that nit? NO! Because 70 BIs at 10nl are just not too many to level up to 25nl

Here's a long post that's targeted at most of your replies. Hopefully it'll generate some good further discussion and advice. Thanks so much in advance for reading and responding!

I'm in an awkward spot with my bankroll. I don't really know what my proper stakes are yet. To give you an idea of what I mean, here is how I answer various BRM related questions:

Q) How much is in your PokerStars account right now?
A) $95

Q) If you lost all $95, how bad would that be?
A) Moderately bad, I could easily re-buy for another $100

Q) If you lost up to $200, how bad would that be?
A) If I lost $200 on a string of bad beats I would consider re-buying for a third $100, but if it was because I suck at poker I would call it quits.

Q) How bad would it be if you lost $400 at poker.
A) Pretty bad, that's well over my upper comfort limit.

Q) So $400 is your effective bankroll size?
A) I'm not sure. On second thought I take back that previous answer about being comfortable losing my current $95. Loosing that would majorly suck. I don't really know what my bankroll is, but these answers have probably given you a rough idea. My roll isn't $10, but it's not $1000 either.

Q) How do you feel about NL2?
A) I can play NL2 with my bankroll very comfortably, but I have a hard time playing seriously when a big win amounts to an quantity that I might not even bother to pick up off the street if it fell out of my pocket. When I stack someone in NL2 I don't think "WOO!," I think "$1.50? I really wish this was more." When I get stacked in NL2 I feel almost nothing. Learning is hard when the positive/negative feedback signals don't fire properly.

Q) How do you feel about NL5?
A) NL5 is more appropriate to my bankroll. With $5 stacks I could withstand a lot of variance, spew, and stacks lost to "learning." However, a $5 stack is something I still don't take seriously. If my stack is the price of a beer and someone pushes me all-in then I can't help but have the thought "Screw it, I'll call, if I get stacked I'll just rebuy, who even cares?" That's a very bad state of mind.

Q) How do you feel about NL10?
A) I'm currently loving NL10. Loosing $10 hurts, so when I play bad I self-correct very *very* quickly. When I win $10 it feels like a significant amount of money, so if I decide that I won rightfully by making a proper play then sear that play into memory and try to re-use it later (which is something that I somehow don't bother doing at lower stakes). On the other hand, if I run into bad beats or good players at NL10 then I could easily see losing enough to push up against the limits of my amorphous bankroll.

Today I spent 12 hours grinding out $25 at NL10. That was $25 that I had lost during the previous 2 days playing NL2 and NL5. I started the day eager to win back my losses from the previous days, and conscious of the fact that jumping up a level might be a bad way to do that. Nonetheless, sat down at NL10 at 9am and adopted the following strategy:

I played just one table at a time and really focused on it. I played ultra-tight and did some reading during the down time. If the blinds dwindled my stack I waited for a half decent hand in position and did a few meat and potatoes plays to get back to breaking even, like stealing the blinds, c-betting into a checker on the flop, or check raising a pre-flop limper on the flop. Those things generally kept me at break-even. If I got a good hand pre-flop I always raised it and played aggressively through to the turn, but I folded pretty liberally on the turn if I got any pushback. My goal was to play break-even poker until something crazy good came along. I would occasionally flop a straight or see something like a KQ8 board with KK in the hole. When these sorts of flops coincided with a fish wanting acting I did whatever I could to grow the pot and take the majority of his stack. This seemed to happen reliably once every 2.5-4 hours, and it's where most of the profit came from.

There was one hour during the day when I started to 4-table NL10 and quickly lost $12 or so (which is when I started this thread). I took a break and went to the dinner for a burger, and when I returned I got back on track single-tabling. Now at 9pm I have a net $25 profit for the day (or a $37 profit if you want to count the $12 I got back after spewing on the multi-table attempt).

After doing well on NL10 today I'm really desperate to try NL50 or NL100, but I have no idea what the quality of the players is there, I know that one good day means nothing statistically, and it's scary that I could eat my entire roll on NL100 with jus 1-2 missteps. What's really enticing about those stakes, however, is that I feel confident that I could play super tight break-even poker indefinitely, waiting patiently for someone to bite too hard when I flop the mega-nuts that one time every 4-5 hours. If the reward is as big as $100 it just feels sooooooooo worth playing patiently. Quite the opposite of NL2! Hopefully I can build up from NL10 to move up through NL30 and NL50 and into NL100 where I really want to be. Or maybe I'll go broke over the course of the next day or two at NL10, who knows!

Whatever I do though, after today I'm convinced that single tabling is the way to go (at least during this intense learning period).

Look, nobody can tell you what to do with your own money. All we can say is that you're a guy who isn't rolled for 10nl and refuses to take lower stakes seriously.

Something has to give. Going on a 10bi downswing is trivially done by a winning reg at a given stake. And then you'll be busto.

Either a bunch of $5 buy-ins mean nothing to you (in which case put them towards your 10nl roll) or it's money you aren't comfortable risking (in which case accept that 5nl is worth your time to build a roll with).

The other thing you need to understand is that if you can get disciplined and realise that 5nl or 2nl is a means to an end then when you play poker with a proper bankroll it's incredibly liberating. It means you can keep your stacks on auto-rebuy to 100bb (it's bad if you're not doing this), push thin edges, and play without fear.

Sitting on one table all day hoping to occasionally make the absolute nuts means you're passing up tons of profitable spots. And that means you're crippling the amount of money you win.

Better to play better at 5nl and win 5bb/100 hands than badly at 10nl grinding out 2bb/100 (not only would you potentially win more money you'd also be improving your game, meaning you move up quicker and net more money in the long run). Even if you do lose the visual appeal of "Omg that stack I won was twice as big". It's not all about immediate $ signs.

+1 ^

Well, it would be easy to play poker if you could say "My hourly rate will go up if I double my tables". Everyone would play the maximum possible tables.

Also, who cares about other players that play 16 tables. You can't, thats the point. Then don't, cause so far it got you nowhere. Stick to where you feel comfortable and get it to the stage where it becomes automatically and add more as you progress as a player. Stop looking at other players and actually look at where your own skill is at the moment.

I found my sweet spot is at 6 tables regular. If I play less I'm getting bored faster and opening the browser for whatever reason. If I play more, I can't keep focused on plays of my opponents and my own.

I only started playing online again late last year (used to play 25-50NL until about 6 years ago).

I deposited $75 & started at 5NL. The stakes didn't really matter tbh as I'd been out of the game a long time and decided I missed it & wanted to start again.

I did used to exercise BRM and realised that even 15 buy ins at 5NL was too low & that there was a good chance of going bust. But it was an amount that I was more than comfortable losing.

I don't think 9.5 buy ins will last you very long at 10NL. I now play 10NLz, usually 1-2 tables and during the course of building up my BR I have had 12 buy in downswings due to variance/tilt/learning the hard way.

You need to think of poker in big blinds not in $ amounts. 100BB is 100BB at 2NL or 100NL. You will only manage to get rolled for the latter if you can grasp that imo. If you enjoy poker then why does it matter than doubling up means you only win $2 or $5? At least you can work on improving and get more out of your $95 investment.

Interesting, I didn't expect such a hard no on NL10. My understanding was that a 20 buy-in roll was in the range of sanity, and though it would sting to loose the current $100 I would indeed rebuy at least once. My roll is at least $200. I could probably put $150 more in there now to be at 25 rebuys for psychological comfort. If that's not the low end of reasonable I don't know what is. I've heard that the long-term ideal is 50 rebuys, so I guess I'm just gambling on having an upswing with the current 20-25 rebuys until I get to 50. It's a conscious gamble I suppose.

I don't have it on auto-rebuy, but if I go much below $8 I do a manual re-buy. I should probably consider doing auto-rebuys, I just haven't had the thought to try it yet. Thanks for the suggestion!

Another psychological factor is that I live in NY, and I have to hop over the boarder into NJ to play on PokerStars. Fortunately I live right on the boarder. The cost of a trip if you include a coffee or two is like $12-$15. At 10NL it's not a tradedgy if I have a down day, but when I have an up day it's extremely satisfying to see the trip pay for itslef. That's a huge motivator to stay focused.

I take your point that I could be missing profitable opportunities by playing ultra-conservatively. I dunno, I feel stupid rejecting what is probably good advice from multiple people at once, but I can't get over how safe I feel at NL10. In 20 hours of solid focused play at 10NL I haven't been down more than $7-$8, and the upswings when you find someone who is intentionally gambling are relatively huge. I'll three-bet AA and they'll push. I call and they flip over A4. I'll floop a straight and they'll shove with air after I check-rasie the flop. It happens very very reliably once every few hours. In the mean time, hand analysis shows that if someone checks on the flop they'll fold to a bet 6 in 10 times. You're practically safe c-betting into checkers with any two cards, but I wait for solid hands that can keep going when called, and that probably puts the win rate for that situation at more like 7:5 (for, not against). Making that one modest play of c-betting into checkers with a decent hand to fall back on is practically enough to turn a stable profit if applied religiously, and I have indeed had slow but steady up swings doing little else.

Maybe the NL10 on the nascent PokerStars NJ operation is just extrmely timid. People don't check raise, they don't three-bet much, every fourth or fifth hand is checked through the flop, river, and turn all the way to show down, even with 3-4 players in the hand. When there is the occational TAG you just stay out of marginal hands agaisnt him, and the majority of aggression from other players is usually of the "LOL IMMA PUSH AND YOU FOLD" variety, which is easy to side step until you have a hand that will bust them.

At the moment if I sit down at NL10 with $10 I wait for real hands, make focused decisions, and feel psychologically comfortable. It's just fun, I guess. If part of why I'm doing this to have fun then NL2 and NL5 just don't cut it for the entertainment factor. Do I really want poker to be strictly a dry grueling grind? I guess something in between is ideal.

I'll post back here if I go broke, and then you can all rub it in!

The auto rebuy is not something to think about. It's a must that you should apply immediately and if you keep playing you will and posting hands it's the first thing everyone will tell you to do when they see you with less than 100bb. And you will one day look back and laugh at yourself for the time you didn't do it.

Ha, noted! I'll definitely turn on auto rebuy during my next session tomorrow.

Another factor I forgot to mention was statistics gathering. One major thing I'm happy about at the start of every session is that I'll have that many more hundreds of hands to crunch numbers on. I'm not even at 10,000 hands yet, and one annoying thing about having jumped around between NL2,5,10 on PokerStars is that I'm not getting consistent statistical samples. I do see regular players there playing at all three levels, but I don't know if I can combine hand histories from all three levels into one pool. PokerStars NJ is really starved for volume, so it's a weird situation. Sometimes there are no NL5 games going, so all the regulars will hop on NL10. Sometimes there no NL5 or NL10 games at all, but if there are a few semi-populated NL2 games people will fill those out instead of waiting for NL5 or NL10 to get going.

I might be playing too tight at NL10 and missing opportunities to push statistical edges, but I don't even really know where those all are yet. I'd be happy for now even if I just broke even in the name of padding the size of my hand history database.

If you have $200-250 that you're willing to use a bankroll then that's okay. It sounded like you were playing with $95 and not wanting to add to it unless you really had to. Whatever your roll is, you need to be willing to play with it, at whatever stakes it rolls you for.

The problem is that you end up worrying about how much money is in your account, when all you should be thinking about is "is this decision +ev". If you start tightening up or turning down high variance situations because you're worried about losing money then you shouldn't be playing those stakes. That's what people are getting at.

Yeah, I have $101 in there now actually. If I lost that due to some combination of bad beats and honest learning mistakes I would feel comfortable throwing in another $150 or so. Though if I lost the current $101 to something like tilt or paying-to-see-it calls on the river then I would quit right there.

That's a good point about being able to play the EV. I'm reading about thin value today:
http://www.thepokerbank.com/strategy...ts/thin-value/

With my current tolerance for variance I could see myself learning to make bets on thin value. On the other hand, I'm also watching videos where it's explained when to shove on the flop with marginal hands if your equity is below 50%, but you think that the folds you induce will bring you +EV. That's something that I could see costing a lot of learn, and having high variance even when you do it right, so I plan to stay away from that for a good long while. (Plus, the people at the NL10 tables on PokerStarsNJ are often maniacs who will call all-in with trash hands because they enjoy making crazy gambles on the turn and river, so it's hard to predict how much you'll really earn with folds. Actually, now that I think about it, I should probably mine my hand history to see how frequently a preflop non-raiser folds to a shove on the flop).

You [in the general sense] are just bad at poker when you aren't thinking
Multitabling more than you can handle means you don't have time to think fully, so obviously you'll lose money

Edit: Read your stupidly long post about moving up to 100NL. I'll be honest with you, you sound like a fish and more than likely you're going to bust your roll.

NL30, learn to read.

Quite honestly based on what you've written so far, I think you have a long way to go to even beat 10NL. There is certainly a lack understanding of poker fundamentals. There are two ways to address this. Become defensive and dismiss it or accept it and work to correct it. Everybody starts at the bottom and most remain there. If risk aversion is a problem a bigger BR will help. I have an issue with this also.

This hit home to me years ago, like 2006, when I was back playing 2/4, 3/6, 5/10 shorthanded limit hold'em.

I was playing 6-8 tables and one of my reviewers pointed out if I was a 2BB/100 player but lost 0.5BB/100 for each table I opened due to multitabling factors (time, concentration, tilt), I may actually be a net losing player as a result.

I realise now that 4 tables is pretty much my comfort zone, enough tables to grind out hands but still make profitable decisions, not be overwhelmed by >4 tough decisions simultaneously, easy to still make reads.

If your limit is currently 2, stick at that and do well. Add a third and try to keep it the same and work up from there. Poker should still be fun, too, and I just can't see 16-tabling to be that!

Best,
Pete