Finding optimal poker levels

The modern online poker game is a very tough one in which to try and make a lot of money. Some years ago then limit hold’em was the game to play as this game was the first real poker game played online. NLHE wasn’t around in online poker as the sites didn’t have the software to play any form of poker that didn’t have a structured betting system in place. But when they did then NLHE exploded in online poker and with it an avalanche of coaching sites and coaching material.

But what happened over the next few years was that a huge shift in how people played poker took place and this meant that the loose fish money dried up massively. If you had any problems with your game or your discipline then you basically had no chance in the new online poker world. Very few people were recording massive earn rates and so this knocked on to the number of people who were playing the game for a living. There are optimal strategies though that have to be employed in a game of poker but I think that an individual poker game is in fact a microcosm of the entire poker environment itself.

The optimal game theory for any poker game is to select individually optimised strategies for each opponent at the table. This is easier said than done when you are multi-tabling. It also means that when you multi-table that you are probably never going to reach a GTO solution. The best that you can possibly hope for is to reach a situation where your play is solid but playing low enough means that you can make money from rakeback and other types of bonuses. However it is getting difficult to make money in the actual games themselves because players are making fewer mistakes and so the effect of the rake becomes paramount or at least of far more importance! Now there are two ways to go in this situation, I think you can play as many tables as you can at far lower levels so as to maximise earn rate by rakeback and ensuring that you capture value from as many fish as possible.

Or you could in fact play at the other extreme of the scale and single table and play higher up but accept more variance. Playing a single table allows you to be able to watch your opponents far more acutely and this allows you to pick up vital playing patterns that you would have missed had you been playing more tables. You can almost feel a players “heartbeat” when you single table but this is even more so when you play against opponents who multi-table. You can put plays down on these people without them even realising it simply because they are multi-tabling so many tables that they cannot make the adjustments required to defeat your more GTO (game theoretically optimised) strategy.