The Grinding Dragon

I seem to be facing a crossroad at the moment and would really be interested in getting some opinions/views on it. 

If you have read my latest blog, I have come to the realisation that if I keep going at the rate I am it is going to take me pretty much 6 years before I can consider reaching my target of trying to go pro, and that is after I finally get up to playing 5/10, which is probably going to take a minimum of 1-2 years alone. So it pretty much goes without saying that this is not a time frame I am happy with. TBH I would love to go pro tomorrow but I know that is really not possible and kinda stupid to even try. 

After a few responses to my previous blog, it got me thinking, reading a lot of previous forum threads and crunching some numbers over night. For me to, in reality, play 5/10 LHE and make a living from it, I would really need to be playing 4 tables to make it possible. That is assuming I can maintain a moderate winrate of 1BB/100 and would see on avg about 100hands/table/hour so would equal approx $40/hr winrate (not including rake). 

I use to play 2-4 tables when I was chasing bonuses etc and playing the micro stakes NLHE and LHE (<0.05/0.10). But to be honest, and it is VERY obvious in my DB, my game was crap when I was doing this. I never really learnt to play and think, if anything, my game went backwards, which is interesting considering it was already at the bottom :p . This is why I am now resistant to the fact of going back to playing more than one table. Since I have been getting coaching and concentrating on one table at a time I have found my game has developed immensely and my profits have reflected this. However even though my BB/100 is increasing and now showing good results over a good sample, my actual hourly winrate is nowhere near where I need it to be to make my targets a reality. 

I would really be interested to hear from others that have recently been through a similar transition, single table to multiple table sessions. Now I know that the number of tables you decide to play is very subjective and that it changes a lot from person to person, and that this debate has raged for years, and if I search the forums I will find threads etc etc etc. But it’s my blog and that’s why I am writing it here and not the forums, so don’t bother with the standard “use the search” responses please. What I was after is opinions on what people felt was the biggest differences between single and multi tabling that you found. Did you find your winrate drop substantially over a good sample? Did your hourly rate increase enough to compensate for this? And just your general views/opinions you found between the two. If you have already posted something similar on DC or in your blog, or for that matter if you know of someone else’s blog or thread that conveys similar thoughts to yours, please feel free to just forward me a link. 

What I am considering for my next move is to drop back down to say 0.05/0.10 – 0.10/0.20 for 10k hands and try playing 2-4 tables to see what happens. I know it isn’t a fair comparison because the play is different between the stakes etc, but I don’t want to risk my BR ‘experimenting’ at my regular .50/1 – 1/2 games. The fact that I will be 2-4 tabling means that it shouldn’t actually take that long to play 10k hands (about 2 weeks if I get my 2hrs/night playing 4 tables) as I should be seeing almost 4 times as many as I do now. And let’s face it, I’ve got nothing to lose really as far as the time spent goes. The biggest thing I notice that suffers when I start adding more tables, is the note taking, it basically becomes non-existent, but I will see if I can compensate for this by spending a bit more time doing session reviews and adding notes after sessions in HEM. 

Well here goes nothing, I will make sure to keep things updated here.