One of the areas in which online poker can claim superiority to live poker is the fact that you can play more than one game at a time. Depending on the site, you can usually play between 4-30 tables at once. Some very sharky sites like PokerStars allow for playing 30+ tables a time. This results in the games being tougher since the sharks can increase their presence on the site. After all, newer, fishier players are only playing one table at a time, but seasoned experts will probably try to play as many tables as they can.
For a long time, Party Poker limited players to four tables at once, which helped their games stay very soft. Poker has changed a lot since then. Players have demanded to be allowed to play more tables, so sites like Party Poker that were once incredibly soft have now gotten tougher due to the sharks getting a little too greedy. Of course, the nature of poker is that the games will get tougher over time. Losing players quit while winning players continue to stick with the game. So allowing players to play more tables is not the only cause for games being tougher than they were three years ago.
As a new player, the transition to playing more than one table at a time can be a little challenging. When players treat it as an “arms race” of sorts to try to play more tables and more hands than all their friends, the results are usually unsavory. The first key to multi-tabling online poker is to take it one step at a time.
A small anecdote is that I’ve been playing online poker for five years. Sure, there are plenty of guys who have played far more hands than I have, but I’m still about as seasoned as you can get. That in mind, even for me it’s tough to play more than 6 or 7 tables at once. The effects of playing a lot of tables lead you to making “rushed” decisions. If you have a very strong foundation of poker strategy, this is not necessarily a bad thing. But new players usually don’t have a very solid understanding of the game. For that reason, it is very important to make sure you’re not playing so many tables that you cannot take the adequate amount of time needed to make the right decision.
Remember, online poker is absolutely huge. There are millions of hands dealt per day in which hundreds of thousands of people participate. Huge sums of money change hands every hour. It’s safe to say that it’s going to be like this for a long, long time. There’s no point in trying to hurry yourself. Play at the pace you are comfortable with. Don’t try to be someone you’re not by 30-tabling like the 19 year old Swedish kid with a YouTube video does. All of the most successful poker players in the world got to where they’re at by approaching the game in a smart manner and taking it at the pace that was right for them.