You are right, there is (almost) nothing, except the two things I mentioned above.

So the question is: Is a big or at least a bigger-than-average stack ESSENTIAL to have a shot at taking down a fast tournament so that you are forced to try to accumulate chips early on at the risk of busting out with a weak holding, and is the guy who folded his first 20 hands and now has an M of 10-15 already out of contetntion for a top finish?

Dan probably did not write about low-stakes daily casino tournaments because he does not play them just as he will not write a book about $1/$2 LHE.

Neither book is 100% accurate but then how could they be. They are complementary but having said that it has to be said that PTF did not get the critical acclaim it deserved.

It doesn't matter. The fact that you get to low M situations does not mean the rate of change of M had anything to do with that. Dan addresses low M situations because they occur, not because they occur more or less quickly.

The fact Dan has examples of low M situations that occur in fast tournaments also has nothing to do with it, because as was already mentioned, he doesn't explicitly address any strategy changes for them. This is the entire point. It was already pointed out to you that Dan gave an example where he did alter his strategy because of the proximity of the next blind change, not because of his raw M number. The evidence that Dan

a) is vaguely aware of rate of change of M
b) does not address it in his overall strategy

is in his own book. And that is the point some of us are trying to make. His M theory is not fleshed out with respect to rate of change of M, and there is evidence that even he agrees with this. This is where Snyder comes in. Snyder and Harrington complement each other. Whatever silly "feud" exists, exists because of 2+2, not because of some inherent clash of opposing ideas.

By the way, if you write "Period" You shouldn't start another sentence immediately afterward starting with "And". It seriously weakens your message.

What a load of rubbish. He explicitly mentions low-stakes online tournaments. Do you think that these are his bread-and-butter games? Yeah right.

When did HoH become a book teaching you how to play $10K buyin tourneys only? It is for NL tourneys OF ALL KINDS. Which is the real strength of the book. The M theory is applicable regardless of buy-in and structure.

Um, have you read the rest of my post? Obviously not. Or, you are dense.
Okay, once again. Hand 9-16. Blinds going up soon. He says "you are looking to make a move". But he does NOT alter his strategy in this specific hand. You are flat-out lying here.

Again, have you read the rest of my post? Dan is not "vaguely aware" of something. You are distorting the facts trying to prove that HoH is somehow lacking and Dan was just too lazy to fully work it out. This is absolute nonsense.
He IS aware that there are tournaments with fast blinds, and he addresses them early on in HoH1. Read above. He still encourages a conservative approach with some very small adjustments.
He does not address it in his overall strategy because to him, it doesn't matter. And there is no evidence of the contrary. He looks at his current M, and that's all.
It is Snyder's opinion that it does matter, but that does not mean Dan needs him to complement his advice. Dan's theory is complete and ready for use in all tournament formats. If Snyder has a different approach, fine. That doesn't mean Dan's isn't fully functional by itself.

Yeah, thanks smartass. By the way, try to read my post this time before you repeat stuff that has been proven wrong already.

lol, OK hotshot. The example was already given, read it yourself and don't expect someone else to do your homework for you. With respect to your smart-ass tone, I really don't care about convincing you of anything, but I'm not letting it slide just so the lurkers don't think that you're some sort of authority. M strategy in Harrington is incomplete. Harrington acknowledges differences that should be made in at least one example, but doesn't work it into his overall strategy. His book is excellent but not perfect. Get over it.

Give me the example. Where is it?
Or give me the post #, I will look it up.

Your and Snyder's opinion, yet to be proven right.
A lie, unless you give concrete evidence.
Agreed.

Oh, you mean post #14? "There are a number of examples where Harrington says (as an example) the blinds are about increase, this has X effect on your 'M' and you need to adjust your play accordingly."

That poster is mistaken. He/she also fails to name an example.

Not absolutely essential to winning, but certainly a very important factor in the decisions you make in a fast tournament (and not just in those first 20 hands but all throughout), to the point where a major consideration should be how fast the M is changing in addition to what the static M value is. Which is something that Snyder's book does, he first analyzes the structure of a tournament and assigns a value for its speed before doing anything else. Whereas except for an anecdotal here and there about being aware of blinds increasing and how it might affect your future M, it is not incorporated into HOH's overall strategy.

Mind you, I still think HOH is a great book, just lacking in this one area. I suspect, as others have said, because Dan is used to playing in deep, slow tournaments, in which case HOH entirely applies.

I'm getting pretty fed up with your crap and accusations of lying. Give concrete evidence of something before you start calling someone a liar. Unless you want to scour the book to prove it wrong, then it's time to shut up. We've already done the homework, it's been posted in various threads. I don't have the book in front of me, I'm not going to drive to get it to satisfy some smart ass, but I'm not gonna listen to your crap anymore either.

Aside from whatever example, it's intuitively obvious. M is supposed to be the number of orbits you can survive at the table. He takes the number of players into account and antes (2 things that other authors don't take into account when they only consider the number of BB you have left.)

Let's say the blinds are $50/100 and you have $1,000 left with 10 players. Harrington says your M is about 7, which is to say you have 7 orbits left.

Now let's say the blinds go up every minute (rate of change of blinds being something Harrington only briefly mentions but does not include in his M calculation.) Guess what? You do not have 7 orbits left, which means your M is not really 7, all of a sudden it's approximately 1 (but who knows what it really is, it depends on a lot of things at this speed.)

Knowing that you have 7 orbits left is a crucial part of Harrington's suggested strategy with different value hands and the probabilities of getting certain strengths of hands. Change what your effective M really is, and those recommendations go out the window.

That example alone is enough to show that M isn't completely worked out. You either have to change your M formula to take rate of change into account, or you have to admit that raw M isn't good enough, if you are going to speed up your tournament structure.

Wanted to point out that Harrington does make adjustments in computing M for a shorthanded table. In fact he calls this value "effective M." To me it seems logically inconsistent for this adjustment to be made, but to not also make an adjustment if the number of orbits that can actually be expected is significantly impacted due to short blind length. What that adjustment should be I don't know.

However M isn't really what it is defined as (the number of orbits you can currently survive). Even in a slow tournament structure with 90 minute blinds you are going to get blinded out in less than 10 orbits if your M is 10 at the start of a specific level. You'd have to average 1 hand a minute to do so which is unlikely. (Obviously this example assumes a live tournament, not online.) However some turbo structures (live and online) are so fast that to ignore the speed of the tournament in making decisions is intuitively wrong. But maybe my intuition is flawed.

Yes, that's why I mentioned 10 players when getting an M value of 7 in my example. If the number of players were 6, then the M value would be about 4.

Right.

Yeah, but it's reasonably close. It's not off by an order of magnitude. We're really talking about scenarios that are off by a lot, for example when you have 15 minute levels instead of 90.

At least the 2 of us seem to be in agreement. A 10-15 minute blind level in a live tournament is only about 1 orbit. I don't normally play these, but did play in one tournament a couple summers ago with, IIRC, 10 minute blinds. I started in the cutoff and the blinds went up before they hit me the first time.

Your ignorance about tournament theory like your manners needs correction.

Harrington on Hold'em II, pages 156-157, Example 7.

"In a few hands, however, the blinds will double and your M will shrink to between 7 or 8".

Later, when justifying his decision to push with TT in that hand: "Once your M drops towards the Orange Zone, that's a great result for you."

This is a concrete example where Harrington adopts an Orange Zone strategy even though his current M is in the Yellow Zone (15) because he's looking forward at how soon it will drop to Orange.

This example, plus any reasonable inference regarding his introduction to M as being a measure of how likely you are to get a better hand in a better situation with a reasonable amount of money left (his emphasis, not mine, on HOH II page 132), lead me to believe that Harrington at least applies a fudge factor to Ms when at a zone threshold. Whether or not the fudge factor is better expressed as Snyder's patience factor or whatever is up for debate. But I don't think it's debatable that a) the fudge factor is there and b) it is relevant in some situations.

So you feel HoH is lacking in that area. That's fine. But I' still not convinced that it is actually lacking. And even if it is, I am pretty sure it's not because Dan didn't consider the speed of tourneys at all, or was just too lazy to incorporate it. He is well aware of different tourney speeds, but it is not his first priority before he analyses how to play. His priority is the actual M during a hand.

What I still not get is why you need a big stack at all cost. Say you play a fast tourney and you want to accumulate a lot of chips. Unfortunately, you are at a table full of loose-aggressive players who raise but don't fold, you don't get any premium hands and your speculative calls turn into nothing. Should you now just get desperate and shove all-in against yet another raise with any two, in the hope to double up? This is likely not to be +cEV and not +$EV either, I would guess.
Or you folded your first 20 hands, and your M is about to drop from 20 to 10. You decide to get aggressive and you steal a medium-sized pot. Your M increases to 25. But it still drops to 12.5 a few hands later. What extra equity have you gained now, except from the bigger stack that you got by PLAYING GOOD POKER? If you can steal from people, by god, do it all day long. But if they won't let you steal, why try?

Thanks for giving an accurate summary of Snyder's pathetic "critical flaw" article on his website and repeating the same bull**** that it contains. Good job. I'm now convinced you are just another one of his cronies, always ready to advertise his book and discrediting Harrington by LYING. The only other possibility is that you are very dumb, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt here.
Wrong wrong WRONG. This is absolute nonsense, as has long ago been pointed out in this thread, by several different people: http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...fpart=all&vc=1

But you might as well stop at post #2 made by betgo:

"I don't think the main issue with M is the number of rounds before you get blinded out if you fold everything.

If you have an M of 3, you increase your stack by 1/3 if you open push and no one calls, and you are getting 4-3 pot odds if you get one caller not in the blinds."

That's all there is to M.

You can define the number M in two ways:

a) The number you get if you divide your stack by the blinds and antes.
b) The number of rounds you can survive without playing a hand if the blinds don't go up.

Dan omitted the very last part of b) in his explanation. But IT DOES NOT MATTER. And if you understood the M system you would know that. And yeah, I assume you do, but you prefer to spew nonsense.

Dan's M theory is not about how much time you have left to wait for a premium hand. If your M is 7, you should not wait the next six/four/two rounds for aces and kings until your M is down to 1. Then you are in the Dead Zone, and Dan's Red Zone advice is all about how to avoid to drop that low. Therefore, "how many orbits you have left" is just another definition/description of what M is, but it is completely irrelevant for the actual advice that Dan gives. That's why it's just petty and lame to keep harping on this triviality when it doesn't matter at all. And you lost the last respect I had for you by doing it.

I see this "effective M" as a flaw in HoH2 as well. P. 277 if others want to look it up. And I don't know why he keeps harping on the "orbits left" definition of M, when it's clearly unrelated to actual M strategy, as you correctly point out in the second part of your post. Maybe that's where some of the confusion stems from.
This is a weak part of the book especially because the effective M is hardly ever mentioned again if I remember correctly. What Dan tried to do here I think was simply to emphasize you have to be more aggressive on short tables and adjust the original hand values accordingly, but he could have done it better, if only to not give the haters reasons to hate.

Nice comeback. I mean, it would have been nice if you had addressed the very valid point I made, but this is good too.

Thanks for pointing out this hand, I had missed it.

But the bolded part is actually not true at all.

At the very end, what does Dan say? "If your M were high here, the best play would still be a healthy raise, to something like $600 to $800."

So the correct play here, the raising play, is entirely governed by your holding (TT). M does not matter at all. It only matters concerning the size of the raise, and Dan suggests the all-in raise because of your actual current YELLOW Zone (15 M) stack size. If you were in the Orange Zone here your stack would be just as big as the normal raise (~$600) so all-in would be automatic.

Dan mentions the rising blinds only to point out that your current situation isn't very good, and any GOOD opportunity to increase your chip count is welcome. Here, holding TT, the situation is excellent. Now Snyder (and this is pure speculation since I haven't read the book) might advise to make this move with any two because you are already desperate (blinds rising soon!) and everyone else might fold. Dan probably wouldn't because a) he doesn't think you are that desperate and b) TT has actual showdown value if you get called, which ATC usually don't have.

But suppose you make this play with any two, and it works. Everyone folds. You gain $300. So instead of folding and having $1,130 you now have $1,480 which is an M of 20. When the blinds double, your M is 10. Are you now that much better off? Was it worth the risk? Maybe, and it's a good play if you had an accurate read on the first player who made the min-raise. In that case, it's just good poker. You saw an opportunity to gain a few chips at sufficiently low risk, so you made a +EV play. But is there any extra value in this play because an M of 10 is so much more better than an M of 7.5? I'm not so sure about that.

Geez...This discussion is still going on? Essentially both systems are equal. I've read both books and it appears that Snyder never read HOH because there's several inaccurate statements in there. Whether you have a "formula", the concepts in both books are nearly identical and since you can't bring your calculator to the table, I'm pretty sure you can estimate and make almost the same kind of decisions given either book.

Harrington describes an "effective M" that adjusts for shrinking tables but the same can be described for faster tournaments. So the idea of a zone is only an estimate. There's times where you still need to look ahead and estimate the actual level you're in.

There's a "fudge factor" in all these books. Take what you can from them but don't overemphasize a formula that was meant to get a point across about adjusting. There's no real formula that's going to automatically make you a winner in any tournament because every situation is unique.

These books are supposed to make you think. They aren't the holy grail of all poker. None of these authors claim to have the equivalent of a unified theory of the poker universe. If it were, then don't you think everyone would be a winning player? I love these books but it's fruitless to argue over the smallest details.

I think it was like 6 months or a year since I checked this last and added my initial 2 cents. This has become like a religious battle. Can't we all just get along

- X

A table full of loose-aggressive players who raise but don't fold is more typical of low stakes online tournaments than low stakes tournaments found in casinos. PTF is written more for those low stakes tournaments found in casinos. Most players, who have just driven a considerable time to get to the casino, paid for parking, etc., do NOT want to bust out of the tournament early. They can't just click a button and move on to the next tournament either. I find you have a lot more fold equity in these tournaments.

Besides that fact though, you seem to be under the misconception that you should just raise and reraise like a complete maniac to build a stack using ATC, any position, against any type of player and whether or not that player is short stacked, medium stacked or big stacked, etc. This seems to be a typical misconception from those THAT HAVE NOT READ THE BOOK!

Since you haven't read the book, your arguments have no credibility whatsoever. Read the book cover to cover 2 or 3 times, then come back and try to make your points. Otherwise, you're preaching to deaf ears.

Exactly. Although I credit reading the PTF with being a major positive to my game I doubt I've ever played a tournament strictly according to what it says. My default is much closer to Harrington, primarily because of the conditions of the games I normally play.

What the PTF did is open my game up in certain situations It added more to my arsenal of tricks. It got me thinking more creatively due to a better understanding of some fundamentals (the rock, paper, scissors concept and how to use each of the tools available).

Yes, obviously. But hey, don't let that stop you from calling people liars in the future, you'll miss out on some nice opportunities.

You're wrong, he's right, and you're basically a troll. It would probably be best if you left the forum.