Multiplicity

I still can't shake this damn throat, coughing, tiredness virus. No doubt continued smoking doesn't help, but that's not my fault, its down to the toothpick manufacturers.

Tuesday night I recorded a small win, two-tabling a 6-max and full table, and coming nowhere in a multi at the same time. Last night I enjoyed a pretty stellar hour before going out; two 6-max tables at once for the first time, yielding $87 very nicely.I really cannot understand why I have spent so long playing just one table. Perhaps I wasn't adept enough at the game in the past, but now I have found playing two PLO cash games to be no problem at all - including two short-handed tables last night for the first time. Its a tiny, meaningless sample so far, but the hourly rate has been huge.

There are lots of factors in play; I have certainly run good, but I also believe the two-tabling makes it easier for me to fold marginal hands pre-flop and avoid loose, cheap flop calls. Meanwhile, the potential negative of not being aware of one's opponents is mitigated greatly by the notes that I have on many players now, and the fact that two 6-max tables only give me one more opponent than a single full ring game.

Actually, coincidentally there is a longish thread on the 2+2 PLO forum right now about multi-tabling. Varioius people claim to be playing three, five, eight, ten, fifteen tables at once. At first I wondered if some of them were joking, but as the discussion continues that seems not to be the case. I don't think I could play such large numbers of tables, and I am not sure I would want to. To play anything more than four tables would neccessitate, I believe, an approach of doing nothing but nut-peddling. Hitting a flop hard and betting hell out of it, otherwise getting straight out of the pot. That means leaving a lot of money on each table, and - importantly to me, at least - not having a whole lot of fun. I enjoy my poker, and would still want to enjoy it even if I were doing a multi-tabling pro approach, so I can't imagine playing so many tables that I cease to be able to bluff-raise that guy but fold cheaply to this guy, and so on.

Still, two-tabling proved so easily-manageable that I will certainly add a third table as and when there is a suitable one to play - table selection can't go out of the window just because you're playing loads of them, after all. A good point raised in that 2+2 discussion, by the way, was that Omaha is an excellent multi-tabling game because it is so much slower than Hold 'Em.

The sit and goes have gone more or less out the window this week. My stats after 30 of the $10+1 tourneys show 14 finishes in 4th or 5th. Yes, FOURTEEN. Turning just four or five of those into cashes would have made the thirty tourneys a reasonably worthwhile investment (given the very low volatility I experience in them). Maybe I need to be prepared to go out early a little more often. However, I still feel that I have experienced a disproportionate number of bad beats when just outside the money, lately. I'll play them here and there and keep building up the sample size. I had a strange itch to play some limit Hold 'Em the other day, but it passed. Right now, having gotten to grips with 6-max and begun multi-tabling, I cannot see any reason to play anything but god's own poker game, Pot Limit Omaha.

And in other news... Boy Genius is probably my favourite poker blogger, insofar as his blog is about poker at all. He slated Andie MacDowell the other day, sadly. I used to be really into her; I think it was the accent as much as anything else. Anyway, she gets a lot of unfair stick as an actress; for heaven's sake, haven't these people seen 'Sex, Lies and Videotape'? Don't they agree that 'Groundhog Day' is a modern classic? She can't be that bad of an actress.I'm house and cat-sitting for my friend again tonight. Crack open the cigarettes and fire up the laptop.