[bustedromo]

[ QUOTE ]
So you are saying that me and stevepa need to work on our velocities? Honestly you might be the one that needs to open your mind and stop worrying about arcane mathematical theories that have almost no relevance during practical play. I'm sometimes guilty of that, but you seem to have taken it to a whole new level.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's not arcane at all. It's one of the most obvious and useful applications of math to tournaments I've ever come across. I've gotten into lots of arcane stuff, and discarded most of it as non-practical. M,M',M'' are not arcane, are practical to monitor during tourneys, and will add an edge to your play once you get good with them.

As I said, it's not difficult to give a try to the most basic metric: namely, monitor M for this round and the next 2 rounds. You can just open Notepad and Calculator and figure them out each time the blinds go up. You can eyeball what kind of changes in M are going to happen, and over time you'll get a feel for it.

I actually use averages of the discrete derivatives calc'd for the next 4 levels, but that's just fine-tuning.

I know a few math oriented inet tourney expert players who track M,M',M''. It takes some time to learn to apply properly, but we all agree presently it gives us a nice edge. You start seeing upcoming inflection points in your tournament life -- it's like an advance warning system.

What's interesting is that Snyder did notice a little-known little-understood area of potential, but looks to have gotten badly sidetracked in his zeal for gunning down other noted gambling authors.

The "estimated # hands until busto" metric I'm working on is a better version of his "True M", but I doubt it will be anywhere near as useful as M,M',M'' (or just monitoring what M will be for the next few levels for your current stack).

As I said before, metrics are the future of inet poker. Why not get ahead of the learning curve ?

I never would have posted any of this without seeing Synder's misinterpretations and misapplications of these concepts falsely presented as a revolution in poker theory.