Sit Out

[Andy B]

Recently, a couple of different posters have mentioned that they play multiple tables on-line, and when they get a good hand on one table, they immediately sit out on the other tables so that they can concentrate on the matter at hand. I have voiced my objections, and thought I'd expand on this just a bit.

The vast majority of my playing experience is live action. In live games, when there are two or three people gone from the table, many players will start to complain. A lot of people prefer playing in a full game. For stud, stud/8, and (shudder) Omaha/8, I prefer a full game. For hold'em, I prefer a short-handed game. When people start complaining about the players who are walking, it takes them out of the gambling mood. This is bad for your bottom line. One of the posters mentioned that a player who objects to the game being short-handed all the time has the option of finding another game. This is particularly true on-line where there is never (to my knowledge) a must move* scenario. In my experience, though, the players who complain the most vocally about players who are walking are the live ones. Do you really want these people to find another game?

If everyone who played on-line played four tables and sat out on three of them a good chunk of the time, the games would break down. Obviously, not everyone is doing this, but of the people who do, I ask, "what makes you so damned special?"

And of course you couldn't do this playing hold'em. If you sat out on a given table after paying your blinds with any degree of frequency, you'd be costing yourself way too much.

* For those of you who only play on-line, in the larger games in many card rooms, when they start a new game at a limit where there is already a game (or games) going, the new game is a "must move" game. When seats open up in the existing "main" game, players are moved from the must move game to fill those seats. If there is more than one main game, you may have the option of changing between those games as seats open up (this is the case at Canterbury Park and Foxwoods; I can't speak for other rooms), but the must move thing does limit your mobility some.