The Poker Tournament Formula by Arnold Snyder...

[bozzer]

I just worked my way through the whole thread, thanks to most of the participants for a very interesting discussion.

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Simple extreme example to make it easy for anyone to grasp. Blinds are 25/50, your stack is 1,000. You are on the button and your M is 13. Blinds go up after each hand. Next hand, your M is 7. Next hand your M is 4. Next hand your M is 3. Next hand your M is 2. You only been dealt 5 hands, you've folded each of them, you haven't paid an ante, and you haven't paid a blind. Your M has dropped from 13 to 2. And you think that won't affect your strategy?

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This is the scenario I kept thinking of when I read all Mason's reubuttals, and was going to post it myself when I got to the end of the thread. Clearly in this situation your 'dynamic' (and rather harder to quantify) M is much more important than your 'formula' or 'static' M.

Now M as HOH defines it is clearly not meant for this sort of game, so let's go to a slightly less extreme example, where blinds go up every orbit, but you start with an M of 30. I think it's clear that here limping 44 on the button would be a terrible idea, since even though you are currently in the green zone every blind is precious. So it seems that tournament speed does influence this less extreme example. And this example, while extreme, isn't that far off some turbos.

If Mason is still checking this thread, I wonder if he could make any comment on these scenarios where, to me at least, it seems that not considering your dynamic M would be a problem.

Lastly, I just wanted to clarify my understanding of M in relation to implied odds vs survival. My understanding is that it is a shorthand proxy for both your implied odds given normal raise sizes and your survival value (how many rounds you have left at the current level).