As we’ve talked about in the past, return on investment (ROI) is a very critical concept for poker tournament players to understand. ROI shows you how much money you’re earning back based on the amount you are investing in buy-ins. If you’d like to learn more about ROI, check this out.

Moving along, some people worry about multi-tabling because they know it’s likely to have an adverse effect on their profit rate. For example, if you go from playing one table to playing 4 poker tables, your ROI could drop from 15% to 8%. Now this might sound like a significant drop, but it’s actually a good thing – as we’ll explain.

Focus on Overall Profits

While we’d all like to have a pretty ROI, the most important thing to focus on is your overall profits. Using the previous example – where your ROI drops from 15% to 8% – let’s say that multi-tabling four tables helps you go from playing two MTT’s daily, to playing eight MTT’s daily.

With the situation where you’re only playing two MTT’s, you’d be earning $3 per day (20 x 0.15). Looking at the eight MTT’s per day, you’d be making $6.40 in profit per day (80 x 0.08). Taking this further, you’re making over twice as much money each day by multi-tabling four tournaments, as opposed to playing just one.

Finding a Balance

Like we showed before, playing more than one table at a time can turn into a lot more profits. However, it’s important to understand how multi-tabling too many tables can hurt both your profits and ROI.

To illustrate this, let’s assume that you move from one $10 MTT at a time to multi-tabling six MTT’s, and your ROI drops from 15% to 1.5%. Assuming you’re still able to get two $10 MTT’s in daily while single-tabling, you’d now be playing twelve $10 MTT’s daily; unfortunately, your daily profits have fallen from $3 to $1.80 (120 x 0.015).

Obviously this is too many tables for you to handle at once, and the multiplied simultaneous decisions are hurting your overall profits. That said, you’ll need to move up slowly when it comes to multi-tabling so you don’t end up hurting your game.