How many games is too many?

When I first started playing online poker in January of 2004 the first thing I did was play a $10 single table tournament (which I won by the way). I was already a seasoned poker player, so It wasn't long until I moved up to bigger games and started playing more than one game at a time. Playing two games at a time wasn't much more difficult than one. After all if you're spending most of your time folding before the flop like you should be, why not get in twice as many hands in the same amount of time. I quickly jumped from two games at a time to three at once, but there I stayed for a long, long time. Of course I tried to play 4 at a time, but adding that extra game really threw me off and I found myself making plenty of mistakes.

Eventually I did make the jump to four games. I recall a time after I'd been playing online for about 6 months when party poker sent me an offer. It informed me that if I played 400 hands in cash games any time in the next week they'd send me a free polo shirt and a hat. There's something about getting a prize that I find exciting. If they had been offering me $20 (which is probably twice what the stuff they were sending me was worth) I almost certainly wouldn't have done it. But I wanted that stupid shirt and hat!

I decided to jump into four $3/$6 limit hold'em games and knock out 400 hands in about an hour and a half. I kindly asked my wife and our roommates to not talk to me at all during the duration of this experiment. I took a deep breath and dove in. It felt like things were moving fast and furious, but since I was nervous about getting distracted playing so many games, I was able to handle it and won $250 on top of the free goodies (which of course went directly to their home in the back of some closet the moment they arrived).

Thinking back it amazes me how much trouble 4 games at a time gave me, because soon after that day I started playing four $55 or $109 single table tournaments (sit-n-go's or SNG's) at a time all day every day. After about a year and a half of that, I felt like I needed a new challange.

I was curious how many games I could play at a time, but I was limited by the fact that my computer was a laptop. Even with just 4 games, the windows (which were not resizable at the time) overlapped significantly and if I added any more I wouldn't be able to see what was going on at all of the tables. Finally I had the crazy idea that I could get 8 games going at once if I used two lap tops ("no need to play 5 or 6 at a time, I'll just jump right up to 8" I thought) So I grabbed my wife's laptop, logged on to two different websites (since you can't be logged on to the same site on more than one computer) and hopped into eight $55 SNG's. I quickly discovered that while I could handle the decisions (barely) using two mice at the same time was not easy. Rather than using two mice with my right hand and potentially getting confused about which one went with which computer, I used my left hand for the computer on the left and my right hand for the one on the right. Not surprisingly, it turns out that it's much harder to use a mouse with your left hand after you've been using your right hand to operate one your entire life.

The first time I tried this experiment I did insanely well finishing 1st in three of the eight along with a 2nd and a 3rd. I did it a few more times with moderate success, but not long after Jen and I moved to a new house and I bought a desktop...a desktop with an uber monitor!

I figured after 2 years of doing this online thing for a living I was ready to improve my equipment. I toyed with the idea of getting two monitors and setting it up where I could have one mouse sweep the magic arrow across both, but then I decided I wanted one big monitor. I thought if I had two normal monitors I'd wish I had one big one, but I'd never wish I had two smaller ones. With great excitement, I went on the Dell website and spent $2,000 on a 30 inch flat screen monitor. It's awsome and may be my favorite possesion. At max resolution it will run at 2560 X 1600 meaning you can run 4 full size windows of internet explorer, or word or whatever with no overlap. More importantly I can run 9 poker games with no overlap. So of course as soon as I got it, that's what I did.

I decided to go with $200 buy-in no limit cash games because apparently I'd been taking crazy pills all morning. In retrospect this was a poor choice, because unlike SNG's where you just sign up and you're in, in cash games you have to do much more just to get in. First you have to join a waiting list and then you have to click on the open seat to join when it becomes avaliable and then tell them how much you want to buy-in for and then decided if you want to wait for the big blind or play right away. Normally this isn't a problem, but when you're alreay in 7 games and you have to go through all this nonsense it's tough. Another problem is once your 9 handed game gets fewer than 7 people in it, it usually collapses as the rest of the players leave to join a full game. It took me the better part of 20 minutes to just get to the point where I was getting dealt in in all 9 games.

Playing this many games at a time in totally insane. Not only can you not talk to other people you can't think about anything that isn't directly related to one of the hands you're in. I'd find myself thinking "what should I have for dinner later...oh shit I just missed three hands." I bet if you looked at me, you could see steam coming out of my ears. I went on like this for about 2 hours during which I played over 1100 hands (I ended up winning a whopping $70). In a casino if you played every hand that was dealt at a table without a break it would take you 32 hours to play 1100 hands. Unfortunately I felt about how you would if you played 32 hours of poker - pretty much brain dead.

These days I usually play 6 games at a time, and I've recently been thinking that I might actually make more money if I scaled it back to 5. Every game you add you make less per game. If you're in one game you can watch all of the players, keep track of what they're doing, and use that information to predict their future actions. If you're in 3 games you can remember what a few of the players have done usually just in the hands in which you were involved. If you're in 6 games you have very little information about the actions of the other players and just have to hope that your general strategy is better than theirs.

Imagine in your favorite online game you can make $10 an hour on average. If you play 2 games you can't make twice as much because your attention is split, but you might be able to make $8 per game per hour or $16 an hour total. Add another game and you might be able to make $7 an hour per game or $21 an hour total. If you go to 4 games at once however you might drop to $5 per game or $20 an hour total so you'd be better off sticking with 3 games. But consider this; what if the gap between you and your opponents is such that it takes almost no thought on your part to make $4 per game per hour and you can handle 8 games at once. Now you're making $36 an hour.

Another thing that goes into this equation is, you can play 1 or 2 games all day long without much drop off in your level of alertness, but if you're playing 7 or 8 at a time it's tough to go for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time without needing a long break. You just start to feel a little fuzzy, sort of how you feel right after you get out of bed in the morning (not how you want to feel with big bucks riding on your decisions)