Have u tried playing 1 table?

[pottie]

Realise what real player reads are... Playing 1 table and watching all players intensively is is the best way to improve your poker IMO

[Niwa]

yes and its boring.

I play for $$$.

[btetreau]

yup, you're right, playing one table and learning individual tendencies is a solid way to play, and will give you greatest +EV if you are good.

however, playing a large number of hands and gaining the experience from watching flops, seeing how often AA gets cracked, making plays on the river, quickly counting outs and calculating pot odds, and just gaining more experience of the whole game is valuable also. for me personally, i get very bored at 1-table at the stakes i play, and i'd rather gain experience via hands rather than studying the fools that i play against. at the higher limits, i'm sure it is best to drop down to 1-table. at NL25, though, i think that for an already-good player it is more about quantity than quality.

[vulturesrow]

To piggyback on what you said, to me SSNL is all about setting the foundation. We talk a lot about ABC poker in this forum. The best way to learn ABC poker is play lots of hands, post on hands that you were confused on, and try to incorporate it into later similar situations. Rinse, repeat. You gain more in both experience and monetary return by multitabling at low limits.

[sammy_g]

[ QUOTE ]
yes and its boring.

I play for $$$.

[/ QUOTE ]
And the road to $$$ is to get better and move up limits. And you get better by playing fewer tables sometimes...

[subzero]

Or, you could let PokerTracker and PlayerView/GT+ watch for you (they're pretty observant). Allows me to 3-table effectively.

[sammy_g]

I really think you learn more by playing one table and thinking through each decision instead of playing four, even if you're only playing 1/4 of the hands. Playing on autopilot stunts your poker growth.

When I played chess, my coach told me to play games at slower time controls instead of a lot of blitz games. I started improving much faster. Poker is like this, too.

[btetreau]

damn good point! i forgot about that.... yeah, without PT and GT+ up and running, i don't think that i would be able to multi-table well and would certainly have to drop down and take a lot more notes.

[sammy_g]

[ QUOTE ]
Or, you could let PokerTracker and PlayerView/GT+ watch for you (they're pretty observant). Allows me to 3-table effectively.

[/ QUOTE ]
Meh, PT reads aren't really reads. They help some, but they aren't reads.

OP is not talking about effeciency. He is talking about improvement.

[subzero]

[ QUOTE ]
...The best way to learn ABC poker is play lots of hands, post on hands that you were confused on, and try to incorporate it into later similar situations. Rinse, repeat. You gain more in both experience and monetary return by multitabling at low limits.

[/ QUOTE ]
It allows you to see years worth of hands in a short period of time (something not possible before online poker). For example, from all the hands that I've seen I know that set over set doesn't happen that often. Same with AA vs. KK, though I've run into AA with kings more often than I care to remember.