Why Online Poker Players Multitask While Live Players Focus Intensely

One incredibly trivial detail but not irrelevant is that when you play online your cards are facing you at all times and your actions can be taken by a mouse click. Physically, it is always going to be slower to look at your cards in particular while taking care not to expose them to others and to count out a pile of chips for a bet/call. The pot size is always readily visible online so you never need to track it and there are often preset buttons for ‘raise 3x’ or ‘bet half pot’ or the like, so you never need to make any calculations. In live games, none of these time-savers exist.

Greater Speed in Online Play

And in online play, you can just click ‘fold in turn’ when you get a moment, and the game won’t get held up if you’re looking away when the action gets to you. Literally, online play is going to be faster than live play in every respect.

The Actual Meat of the Question

When I started out as an online pro, I only played 2-3 tables at a time. A bit of that was a bankroll consideration, but mostly it was because when I tried to add a 4th table, my attention became too spread out, and I lost the ability to focus properly on any given hand. Over time, I got better at this and was able to add more and more tables without my level of play on any one of them dipping below my minimum self-imposed play-quality threshold.

Autopilot Play Mode

Online play might not be as common now, but back in the day, it could really be done on autopilot if you were skilled enough. Was I ever bringing my absolute A game to any of the 15 tables I was playing in my last year or two? Not a chance. But my B game had an earn rate that was like 90-95% of my A game. I couldn’t do my A game on more than about six tables but could do B on up to 15 and, on occasion, a few more than that.

The raw math of it said, 'who cares if my play level slips a tiny bit if I’m making way more money?' This was a big part of my online 15-tabling strategy. I was only playing maybe 20–25 of my hands at all, so I could fold quite a bit. When I raised preflop, I had a standard opening amount and a standard adjustment for any players already in the pot. And a decent amount of the time, I’d just take the blinds, so that’s another chunk of my hands that didn’t require any actual thinking. It was only if we saw a flop or if preflop action really escalated that I’d ever actually need to do any thinking, so it was easy enough to manage.

Focusing Fully in Live Play

On the other side of the coin, when I’m playing live, I only have one game to focus on. It deserves my full attention. Beyond the physical mechanics of being slower, as discussed in the first paragraph, it can be helpful to look around a bit at your opponents when making decisions. It can help to do a bit of posturing, whether to sell a strong hand as a bluff or to make a 'tough laydown' when you have absolute garbage. And while I think that people subscribe way too heavily to the idea of 'tells,' it's nice to get extra information like that. For instance, the 3 seat might be drunk as a skunk, or the 6 seat is a 95-year-old man who hasn’t played a hand in over an hour and is now sitting up very straight, watching all action like a hawk, and making a big raise.

These things just take longer, and that’s okay. In live poker, there is no autopilot mode; every decision is critical and requires full concentration.