[k_squared]

I agree it is an interesting post, but I find the example a little pedantic, and irrelevant to most play. It is not hard to figure out when someone is a habitual bluffer, and it is not hard to adjust to playing them... On the other hand it is much more difficult to adjust to a player capable of bluffing, but who is not a habitual bluffer... but if you base your read of the player on a set of 50 hands it can often be hard to tell the difference between an agressive player getting a feel for the table, and a maniac bluffer. Getting 'reads' on people is simply not as easy as observing a few hands and drawing a singular conclusion. People adjust as the table changes, so our reads cannot be static. Playing one table allows you to focus on making decisions and not making mistakes, but does not maximize your ability to do so in the long run. Maximizing your ability to play poker well would amount to playing the most hands possible to which you can pay full attention.

How many decision REAL decisions do you make per hundred hands? If you play 20-30% of your hands then it seems to me you could easily pay attention to practically EVERY hand you play even if you two table, or possibly three table. Now at some point obviously you lose the ability to do the kind of indepth analysis of your opponents that is being advocated, but it is certainly not simply from moving to two tables.

I also believe that part of the online game that is different is that on big sites you rarely sit with the same players for thousands of hands, and so the conclusions you are drawing are from a substantially smaller data set, and so significantly more prone to errors.

Just some additional thoughts...

-K_squared