In the months of August and September, online poker rooms host several of the main online series of the year, such as the WSOP Online, from GGPoker, or the Global Poker Online Championship, from CoinPoker. It is normal for players to play many more tables at once during these festivals, with the aim of having more chances to win a big prize. But sometimes, this can be counterproductive.
It is common that when a player sits at their computer to start their session, they begin registering for all the tournaments that seem playable. One has a good structure, another has a softer field, another has a good prize pool. And before they realize it, they are registered in more tournaments than they planned to play, and that doesn’t even feel like a mistake.
This is often related to a feeling of “now or never,” as if the annual calendar were not full of series every so often, which always give the possibility of winning big prizes. But every time one starts, it feels like that is the real chance to change everything.
According to the psychoanalyst specialized in high competition, Alan Longo
“It’s as if the EV or ROI number were displayed in the lobby, next to the buy-in. But no. That number is made up by you playing the tournament. And it depends on certain conditions, such as playing a specific number of tables, giving yourself a specific amount of time for each decision, and a specific amount of attention for each spot,” Longo states.
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Excess of Open Tables Can Decrease Your Performance
If you change those conditions, your ROI number will also change. The event is the same as always, but you are playing under non-optimal conditions, and that drastically alters your ROI.
Every time you change tables, you have to rebuild the entire context of what has been happening at that table, and that reconstruction costs you cognitive capacity each time you do it. The more tables you play, the less time you will have to recover between tables, and your attention capacity will plummet.
When your brain gets saturated like this, you probably still solve simple spots well, but when you face a really complicated decision, which can cost or be worth thousands of dollars, your brain arrives tired and with little attention capacity. And that is exactly where you get your ROI when you are in good conditions.
Alan Longo recommends “planning your play limit before looking at the calendar.” The number of tables should not be the maximum you can play, but the maximum with which you can play at your maximum level. It is important to decide that number before sitting down to play and not when you are already registering for tournaments, because that is when the deviation from the axis appears.
If you realize you are making decisions without fully evaluating each spot, it is probably time to stick with what you have and not register for more tournaments.
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