The Poker Tournament Formula by Arnold Snyder...

[Arnold_Snyder]

Shaman, here’s the point: It comes down to the fundamentals of professional gambling.

You make money in gambling by getting action on your bets when you have the edge. The more action you can get when you have the edge, the higher your win rate will be. The bigger the edge you have on your action, the higher your win rate will be.

When any player gets a chip lead on you, he has a mathematical advantage over you. You can beat his mathematical advantage only if you can play with sufficient skill to equal or surpass his chip stack advantage.

On p. 129 of HOH II, Harrington says: “In the Green Zone you’re a fully-functional poker player, and it's worth taking some risks to stay there." (The italics are Harrington’s.) He goes on to touch on the skill options you lose as your chip stack gets smaller and smaller in relation to the cost of a round. My contention is that—even if you are solidly in the green zone—the faster you are approaching the yellow zone, the more risk you should be taking to maintain your fully-functional status.

Whenever an opponent gets a chip lead over you in a tournament, he has a mathematical advantage over you. If your opponent plays with equal skill to you, his chip lead is, essentially, insurmountable, unless you are lucky enough to be dealt superior cards. So I’m not saying you will never win in this situation—there is a lot of flux in gambling, and even when you’re a dog, and facing an opponent of equal skill, you will sometimes get lucky and beat him.

But you won’t beat him overall in this situation, and that’s very important. The only way to beat an opponent who has gained a significant chip lead on you is to neutralize or overcome his chip lead advantage with your superior skill. Unfortunately, if you have allowed your stack to get short in relation to the costs of a round (which is to say, if you have sunk into what Harrington calls the yellow, orange or red zones) you no longer have access to a full set of poker skills. To borrow Harrington’s term, you are no longer a fully-functional poker player.

In addition, once you get short you are no longer able to maximize the action you get when you have the edge. So here you are, forced to play with less skill and less action, precisely when you need to maximize both.

In order to stay in the Green Zone in the Orleans Friday night tournament, you have to make $3275 in chips (more than double your starting stack) during the first 50 hands, meaning you have to have a total stack of over $4500. It’s true that every once in a while in this number of hands you’ll happen to get pocket aces early on when two other players at the table happen to have pocket kings and queens, and you’ll triple up. But way more often you’ll see only a few premium hands, which you aren’t guaranteed to get action on. (And note how different this situation is from a long slow tournament with hour-long blind levels. The $5K NLH event at the WSOP, for instance, has approximately the same starting M as the Orleans Friday night tournament, but some pro players (Phil Helmuth allegedly among them) consider the first blind level (approx. 30 hands) so irrelevant, that they don’t even sit down to play until the second blind level has been reached.)

The slower the tournament structure, the more a conservative poker strategy, such as Harrington’s “green zone” strategy, becomes a viable option. But you should always keep in mind, even in slow tournaments, that anyone who builds a significant early chip lead has a big advantage over anyone with a lesser stack who is playing with equal skill. And again, fast tournaments require a much faster “green zone” strategy just to keep you in the game at all.

I want to thank BigA/K for taking the time to explain so much of my logic here. I realize that most of you guys, being smart advantage players, actually read books by standing around Barnes and Nobles for hours on end, so it may be a few weeks till you all get to the really good stuff. I mean, you’re still discussing the elementary premises of the book. And much as I appreciate BigA/K’s efforts here, I do hope I never bump into him at any table where I’m playing, at least not on my left. I won’t be able to get away with [censored] with him there.

Thanks to all for the stimulating discussion.