Poker Portal

There is a tremendous tendency these days for players to want to play deep stacked poker but I feel that many players are jumping into deep stacked play without the proper preparation. Recently this has been highlighted to me during my own poker challenge where I set out to turn $100 into $10,000. I actually completed that in December after having started on the 1st April. However what I found was that when I started playing more and more tables in an effort to quicken the process that my game became worse.

I could play very well on six tables but my level of concentration was causing problems when I increased that number to ten or twelve. Playing numerous tables is fine as long as you can effectively play them well. I am a good solid deep stacked player but the problem was that I was making mistakes when several big pots were converging together at the same time. So a solid deep stacked player was then becoming a bad deep stacked player and all because I was piling extra tables onto myself.

So what this boiled down to was me being naïve about how I could play when I had ten or more tables in front of me. So this then brings up the point of the article in that deep stacked poker can be difficult to master and previously winning players can become break even players or worse simply by slightly changing the conditions. But this highlights one very important part of no limit hold’em and gambling in general. This is that strategies that win small amounts of money for lengthy periods of time but which also have the capacity to lose large amounts can be dangerous strategies to employ.

It takes a very disciplined style to perfect this process and do it well but if you have any flaws in your character or if your concentration levels are not what they should be then you are going to have problems multi-tabling a lot of tables in no-limit hold’em. I perhaps committed one of the cardinal sins of multi-tabling and that was to add tables too fast. The fact is that when you are playing six tables and finding that you have loads of downtime then it may not be a good move to jump straight to playing ten or twelve.

When all you have to do is fold for long periods then playing twelve tables feels easy. This is until you are called to play several converging pots and those pots start to become big pots. Then this just knocks on into bad play which then becomes bad bankroll management and then bad poker. I think that it is frighteningly easy for good winning players to become losing players temporarily. It is the easiest thing in the world to become blasé about your winnings and success and then to believe that you can basically do anything you want and that will continue…..but this is not the case at all and I for one have realised this recently.

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