[Toonces]

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However, in a fast tournament you may very well find yourself in a situation where in the very next hand your M will be cut in half and in 11 hands or so your M will be cut again. If there is an adjustment that needs to be made for this 'overlap' in future M decreases then THIS is an adjustment that is found in fast tournaments and never in slow ones. Now tournament speed is a direct consideration or at least it is a method of taking this 'overlap' of future M decreases into consideration.

I always had a small problem with the definition of M given in HOH2. On page 125 it is defined as "the ratio of your stack to the current total of blinds and antes". On the very next page "What M tells you is the number of rounds of the table that you can survive before being blinded out". Both of these definitions/numbers are important but can be drastically different. In a very fast tournament your current starting M might be 40 but your stack might only last 4-5 rounds if you didn't play! This seems to be the key to adjusting play in fast tournaments. Again, I believe this is due to the 'overlapping' influence of future M decreases.

Vlorg

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This is exactly the point that I think Mason seems to be punting on over and over. If your M is 20 and Q is 1 in the WSOP, that is very different from playing at the starting bell of the Riviera tourney ($1500 stack; 25-50 blinds; 15 minute rounds) where your M starts at 20, but is scheduled to drop to 9 in 15 minutes and drop to 4 in 30 minutes (without a playable hand).

I'm not saying that Snyder's methods are certainly correct, but I can't see how it can legitimately be argued that the second scenario (when I know that I'm 20 hands away from dropping into the Red Zone) should be treated the same as the WSOP scenario despite the M and Q being the same in both scenarios.

Of course, the problem with accelerating your Red Zone play early in fast tournaments is that the blinds are still worth so little. Thus, I would guess that early strategy in those fast tournaments is how best to stack your opponents, not just steal their blinds.