[alanbrown]

I heard a lot about Snyder before I read his book (currently half way through). Actually, it was the fact that Sklansky seemed so obsessed with him on this site that made me curious about what he had to say.

And I'm liking his book a lot. His concept of measuring the quality of a tournament by its patience factor is the single most valuable things I've taken from a poker book in a long time. It's one of those things that makes you go huh! how come no-one did this before?

However, I digress. The topic under consideration is whether his plan of pushing harder, earlier in 'faster' tournaments is a good idea.

I think it is.

Obviously in a no blinds game everyone should be ultimately tight. And in a game where everyone plays for their whole stack on every hand nobody should ever fold. Snyder has found a methodology for measuring how far along that tight/loose spectrum one should play.

His point, in a nutshell, is that how loose you should play isn't just a function of the current blind level but also how soon those blinds will go up. An extreme example to illustrate would be to talk about how one's strategy should change if the blinds doubled every orbit. You couldn't then just treat each blind level as an independent decision. The fact that the next one is upon you immediately means you must stay ahead of that breaking wave or get crushed in it.

I'm not sure I agree with Snyders exact conclusions. He considers being <30BB to be short stacked and that you're now looking at being an All In player. That seems a little extreme to me. But his idea of linking strategy to the Patience Factor of the tournament is absolutely the right idea.

As for the question of stack utility, I'm unsure about that one. I agree that I wouldn't flip a coin at the start of a tourney for a third of my stack. The reason being that I believe that I have a >50% chance of increasing my stack by 1/3 by playing pokah.

I agree that Snyder's book is definitely a system also.

I'm not sure how I feel about chip utility. I think it's more relevant in live games than online games where you can just fire up another tourney. But in live games the ability to cover your opponents AIs does sound like it would make them steer clear of you a little more.