Pardon my French, but I played a merde-load of poker hands today. Twenty-five hundred hands, in fact. Seriously. I played 2572 hands of poker in one day, and it took just a little over three hours to do so. Two 1.5-hour sessions: one in the morning for 1100 hands, and one in the afternoon for the remainder.
Why on earth would I do such a thing? Good question. I've been asking myself that same thing all evening. Was it for the money? Meh, probably not. I did make $40 for the day, but I think the real reason I gave it a go was to simply see if I could play sustained, mega-multi "Hyper-Poker" sessions and not go insane. In other words, was I up to the task of playing that much poker, that fast, and actually make money?
For the first Hyper-Poker session I played sixteen simultaneous tables of $0.01/0.02 NL full ring. Yes, you read that correctly: sixteen tables at once. My plan was to play only pocket pairs and AQo or better, and I would steal if it were folded to me in the cut-off or button and I had at least a face card. I did not defend my blinds unless I had a premium hands and the raiser had big Attempt to Steal stats. And that's about it. In other words, I played a super stripped-down version of basic ABC poker.
During this morning session I didn't really get any big hands dealt to me; instead I just chugged away, averaging a very linear $0.60/100 hands played for a tidy little profit of $6.55. The thing that really struck me during this entire session was how soft the players were. Typical table VPIP averages were 35% or greater, and I took down tons of pots by simply being aggressive in LP and then C-betting the flop. If I got any resistance, I shut it down. I was also able to limp into tons of pots in LP with small pairs and set-min very profitably.
In the afternoon, I basically repeated the experiment, but at a higher limit. I fired up sixteen tables of $10NL full-ring, and tried the same approach. I made a nice profit of $33 for the session, but I really didn't do anything differently. The competition was certainly better... or I should say more aggressive. The opp tended to open with raises a lot more, and they weren't afraid of 3-betting and defending their blinds. I laid down many more hands PF when I got resistance than I did in the 1/2-cent games. My variance was also much more pronounced, with a lot of up and down, followed by big upticks.
So what did I learn from all this insanity? Honestly, I'm not sure. Multi-tabling has some benefits, but it also has some negatives, too. Here's some of what I gleaned from the experiment:
The Pros of Multi-Tabling: Playing successfully with more than 6 tables at once means you have to make very fast, very good decisions. I think that playing Hyper-Poker forces you to trust your instincts and go with your gut; it's an extension of the whole "Blink" phenomena; i.e., the Think Long, Think Wrong problem. This is probably a good thing. I think.
Hyper-Poker also (obviously) results in massive accumulations of hands and stats. If you have a leak, at the end of a relatively short session you can discover it in your PT3 stats. (oh, and of course you also accumulate tons of frequent player points, too, during the sessions.) Everything is amplified and accelerated. Again, a good thing I think.
Hyper-Poker also makes you focus on just a few key HUD stats on your opp. You literally don't have time to digest more than just a couple of stats. I used VPIP, PFR, and Fold Steal Attempt numbers almost exclusively today. I basically didn't look at anything else, except *maybe* the Attempt to Steal stat if I had a spare milli-second.
I also think Hyper-Poker helps train your brain to see/accumulate betting patterns and situations. The Guru isn't a big fan of my multi-tabling, but he has recently said that it probably helps hone my poker instincts by simply force-feeding me thousands of hands in a short session. You see all kinds of situations come up, over and over again.
Finally, the best reason to play Hyper-Poker is that it forces you not to dwell on results. You literally don't have time to wait around and see if you've won a hand or not; in fact, you often don't ever get to find out if you won or not. This means you have to really focus on playing each hand the best you can and then moving on. Results don't matter in Hyper-Poker, because you usually don't even know the results... and another table and hand has popped up and beeping for your attention.
The Cons of Multi-Tabling: The biggest problem with Hyper-Poker is that it's not really "poker." Instead, playing this way is more akin to a video game than the nuanced game of out-thinking your opponent and getting inside his mind that high-level poker is supposed to be. Now, Hyper-Poker is indeed level-2 poker, but it's not a very deep level-2 game. It simply can't be. You put your opp on a range based on his VPIP and PFR, then decide to fold, call, or raise, and away you go. Post flop, you're playing either c-bet poker in position, or fit-or-fold poker out of position. It's fast and scary, but it ain't rocket science.
The other problems with Hyper-Poker are less important, but still worth noting. First, you have zero time to enjoy a big win. This is the flip-side of the Results Don't Matter thing; when you finally get those aces and you shove and get called, the table too often disappears behind a bunch of other tables and you rarely get that thrill of seeing yourself stack the opp.
Playing H-P is also clearly more stressful and draining than playing just one or two tables. I can do it for about 1-1.5 hours, max, and then I start getting sloppy. I imagine if I were twenty years younger I would have the stamina to play 2-3 hours this way, but there is no way I could do that now.
You also can't take notes on the opp when playing H-P, and if you try (which I occasionally did), you fall so far behind on the tables that you often time out on more than one of them. Then just getting them back up and running gets you behind on others. You only have time to play the immediate hand in front of you... and nothing more.
Finally, playing H-P is very addicting and takes its toll on your patience when you step back and play "regular" poker. I closed out my second session this afternoon by playing a couple tables of $25 for twenty minutes, and I thought everything was running in painfully slow motion. It's amazing how much time you actually have when only one or two tables are open to make a decision. But this goes back to the Think Long, Think Wrong problem, too.
Bottom line: is Hyper-Poker good or bad? Honestly, I don't know. Hyper-Poker is something I'm going to continue doing, but I'm not sure if it's really that good for me and my game in the long run or not. I'm making money, but I'm not sure my game is actually getting any better or not. And, boy, is it fast for an old guy like me. Merde!
All-in for now...
-Bug
PS. An interesting thing happened during today's H-P experiment: I ran into another limitation of FullTilt. A few months ago, when I started multi-tabling cash games, FullTilt wouldn't let me play more than eight games at once unless I got their prior permission. Well, it turns out they have another threshold at 16 tables. During the 1/2-cent morning session, I tried to open a 17th table and got an error message that said I needed to contact Support and get them to increase my limit.
PPS. I also had another weird experience at one of the tables I playing in the 1/2-cent session. On one hand, all of the players were dealt FOUR cards pre-flop (i.e., an Omaha hand). I thought I was seeing things, or my video card was acting up, but all the other players at the table wrote "WTF"-type comments in the chat box immediately afterward and commented on the hand. This only happened for the one hand, and then we were back to normal hold'em. Bizarre.
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