Dene Tribe's Poker Tournament Evaluation System is a Rip-Off

[Mason Malmuth]

First off, I'm not the editor of our Internet Magazine.

However, our editor does send me the articles to read before they are posted, but this month due to a huge amount of manuscript work I did not read all the Internet Magazine articles that went up and the ones I did read (about half of them) were read very quickly.

With that being said, I did read Poker Tournament Evaluation System by Dene Tribe very quickly and saw nothing wrong with it. It's common knowledge, and has been common knowledge for many years, that tournaments which raise the stakes very quickly are not skill oriented. Poker players refer to these as "Crap Shoots," and this was not a revelation from you.

I have asked a friend of mine to look at the article independently of me (and our editor). If he feels that you and/or your book should be cited, we will add that into the article.

I also need to point out that the article of yours that you cite in your post contains numerous inaccuracies as to exactly what Harrington says. As for not crediting your work, or the work of others in our books, this is something that we are very concious of and that we do in our books. In fact, when working on manuscripts for publication, we frequently will have our authors add-in references to the works of other authors whether they are Two Plus Two or not.

Finally, I do want to point out that even though I gave your book a positive review, an 8 on my 1-to-10 scale (with anything being 8 or higher being something I recommend) your book does contain flaws which have already been discussed in length on some of our other forums.

MM

[Arnold_Snyder]

The revelation of my book is that fast poker tournaments are not crap shoots, but highly valuable for players who adjust their tournament strategy according to the structure of the tournament. The reason fast tournaments were considered crap shoots is because the published strategies were incorrect--losing strategies--for these events. My book provides a fast tournament strategy in which I have compiled a win rate of over 230% past 5 standard deviations.

In addition, my book is the first to provide a systematic method of assessing the skill value of fast tournaments.

[MrX5000]

[ QUOTE ]
The revelation of my book is that fast poker tournaments are not crap shoots, but highly valuable for players who adjust their tournament strategy according to the structure of the tournament. The reason fast tournaments were considered crap shoots is because the published strategies were incorrect--losing strategies--for these events. My book provides a fast tournament strategy in which I have compiled a win rate of over 230% past 5 standard deviations.

In addition, my book is the first to provide a systematic method of assessing the skill value of fast tournaments.

[/ QUOTE ]

Personally, I think you AND Harrington's M have good points. I use your criteria as a way of choosing the tournament but as far as adjusting your play based on where you're at in the tournament, it's nearly identical because harrington does make these adjustments as far as loosening up starting hand requirements and short stack play just like your book. Your book claims that he doesn't take certain things like position into account which is nonsense. I've read them both and I agree that you make some inaccurate statements about harrington's formula. It's almost as if you really didn't read his entire 3 books set like the most of us.

Anyway, I do believe along with yourself that you deserve some type of credit about you're blinding off theory (I'll just call it that because simply put it's how long it takes to blind out). The other formula seems like an abbreviation of this formula. But to be honest, your formula seems almost identical to Harringtons. Did you realize that Harrington adjusts his M according to the number of players at the table and a correction factor can be added based on how many hands per hour? Now take into account the zone theory he comes up with and you pretty much have the same theory as yourself except it 2 times 2 instead of 2 plus 2. The answer is still 4.

[Piers]

[ QUOTE ]
The revelation of my book is that fast poker tournaments are not crap shoots

[/ QUOTE ]

You are correct

[ QUOTE ]
but highly valuable for players who adjust their tournament strategy according to the structure of the tournament.

[/ QUOTE ]

but for the wrong reason.

Fast structure tournament give a large advantage to players who understand low M poker. M is very useful as a tool for quickly estimating pot odds in various situations.

The use you and Dene Tribe put M to seems to me to be fairly obvious anyway and rather missing the point.

[ QUOTE ]
<=5 No Stack Lottery No Skill: This type of tournament will proceed very rapidly and those who receive the best cards will prevail with little regard for tactics.

[/ QUOTE ]

This quote from Dene Tribe’s article is just wrong. “No Skill” is just an exaggeration that is going to confuse people. Further his article seems to overlook the fact that faster tournaments are quicker than slow ones. You should not compare one fast tournament with one slow one, but rather several fast ones with one slow one. Once you make this adjustment I think you find fast tournaments have a lower variance as measured against time and are almost as profitable although not necessarily for the same people.