No More Multi-tabling

I'm always adjusting, tweaking, or trying to find a better, more efficient way to do something. It's time to do that again, and the issue is which, or how many, tournaments that I play.

I'm always working on the balance between playing enough tournaments to keep me busy and being choosy enough to pick tournaments that give me the best chance to make a profit.  There will be some changes if I ever get a second site up (more about that in a future post), but the issue at hand is multi-tabling.

The basic idea of multi-tabling (simultaneously playing more than one tournament or cash game) is that divided attention will yield fewer dollars per tournament, but make more money in the long run. Here's a simplified example:

I play one tournament at a time and my average profit is $5 per tournaments.  If I play two at once, I might only average $3.50 per tournament, but the total is $7, which means I'm making more dollars per hour.  I thought that I needed to do that to make money faster, but I realized last night that I'm not ready for that yet and probably never will be.

I played a tournament last night that went very well.  I made the final table and got a decent cash. The results for one tournament don't matter than much unless it's a huge cash, but what's important is that it was the best that I've played in several weeks.

I haven't concentrated that well any time in the last month.  I realize now that is was much easier to lock in when I could concentrate on the dynamics of just one table.

Maybe I haven't had enough practice with two tables, but I don't think that's the issue.  I'm just not wired correctly to play multiple tables.  I thought about it and realized that with almost any task I compartmentalize and do one thing at a time.  I always break a task into smaller pieces. When I put up a blog post I usually have bullet points of the things I want to cover.

When I was working on a piece of clarinet music, I would often look at a difficult passage and break it down, working on only one measure at a time.  I would work on that measure over and over until I could play it perfectly several times in a row, then go on to the next measure and do the same thing. Only then would I play the entire passage and see how it all came together.

It all makes perfect sense.  Those of us with ADD tend to be bad at multitasking, but we're very good at locking in on one task if it's something that we enjoy doing.

There is one final reason that I need to stop playing two tables.  It's taken me away from the main task at hand, which is building up a bankroll as fast as I can.  If I had a big bankroll and could afford to spend a lot of time messing around and trying different things when I'm playing, maybe I could keep working on it, but I no longer think that it's the right approach.  Not only am I not good at it, but also I need to build my bankroll as fast as I can, and that's not going to happen with my concentration divided.

I need to keep being step-by-step methodical Clif and do things the way that works for me.  It's like the old joke:  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.

That's how I roll.