"True M" vs. Harrington's M: Critical Flaws in Harrington's M Theory

[betgo]

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this guy is ridiculous, obv so offended that his book is not being taken seriously. what a fragile ego


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Hi kniper:

What you state in the quote isn't accurate. On my 1 to 10 review scale (with 10 being the best) I gave Snyder's book an 8, and anything that I rate an 8 or higher I do recommend. However, in my opinion there are flaws in the book, the most notable being that Snyder analyzed the tournaments as if they were winner take all which of course they are not.

Best wishes,
mason

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Seems like Mason is being generous giving it an 8. Of course I haven't read the book, just the articles, which convinced me not to read the book.

[Dr1Gonzo]

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this guy is ridiculous, obv so offended that his book is not being taken seriously. what a fragile ego


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Hi kniper:

What you state in the quote isn't accurate. On my 1 to 10 review scale (with 10 being the best) I gave Snyder's book an 8, and anything that I rate an 8 or higher I do recommend. However, in my opinion there are flaws in the book, the most notable being that Snyder analyzed the tournaments as if they were winner take all which of course they are not.

Best wishes,
mason

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Seems like Mason is being generous giving it an 8. Of course I haven't read the book, just the articles, which convinced me not to read the book.

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Actually, the book is very good but there are some laughable sections just he has just plagiarised straight off the internet...particularly the section on cheating in casinos.

[mutiger91]

Snyder's general premise that tournamnet structure dictates play is true. However, rather than claiming the Harrington "M" as a false M, Snyder could have been a lot more constructive by discussing how to determine where tournament inflection points take place. Harrington has already looked at it from the individual's standpoint. But what if we step up and take a look at a macro level at what is going on around us in the tournament.

I've been pretty successful with the fast live tornaments Snyder discusses. I Played a few before reading HOH II and didn't do very well. Then I played again and realized something. At a each blind level a tournament can only sustain so many healthy stacks. If there are more stacks than there are chips to make those stacks healthy, some of those stacks will die. So far, not very brilliant, right? Card rooms have known this for a long time. They raise the blinds to make sure these tournaments end.

But what if we apply Harrington's zones to the average chip stack? Using Harrington's M and the red-zone concept, you can see where that will happen pretty easily. I use M=5 to show when the tournament strucutre itself is desperately trying to regain equilibrium by busting out players to get to a more sustainable level. At this points, tournaments are the "wild wild west" and we move away from poker and more into showdowns.

If we know when this is going to happen, we have a huge advantage by making our move before the rest of the field when people are still willing to make tough laydowns.

It's probably easiest for me to illustrate with an example:

My local cardroom has a Friday night tournament w/ 15 min blinds that increase almost geometrically. Because it's Friday, they cap entrants to 50 and initial chips are 1500.

The blinds start at 10/15 w/ 10 min levels. At that level the average M is 60, so nobody has a pressing need to act (or do they?). After the first break, the blinds are 200/400. The total chips in the tournament are 75K. For the average stack to be above M=5, it needs to be at least 3000. Stated another way, if you haven't doubled up by break, you are in trouble.

My whole strategy in these tournaments has been to play loose/aggressively enough to get 4000-4500 chips. This allows me to be a little more patient than the average stack after the break and wait to pick off weak all-ins from small stacks with hands that will beat their pushing range. I chose 3x rather than 2x by break, because I want to be able to sustain loss of some blinds or a loss in what should have been a favorable race without being behind.

I know from experience that a similar phenomenon happens at the larger buy-in tournament with longer rounds. There it happens after the second break, but you could figure this out in advance looking at average M without ever having played it.

[sellthekids]

it's probably been said in various ways in previous posts, but to clarify:

didn't Harrington not only ask you to compute your M, but to also know your opponents'?

M is a tool used to determine relative stack size & strength in relation to blinds/antes and your opponents, right?

i make plays (bets, steals, bluffs, etc) not only based on my opponent's previous plays and my interpretation of his skill, but also based on his stack and his opinion of his position, with regards to M. do you ever bluff a guy with an M of 30+ when you have an M of 10-? i would expect to get called down a lot....

ps - Sherman, nice avatar, from one Sig Ep to another (TX Rho)

[bustedromo]

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See article:

"True M" vs. Harrington's M: Critical Flaws in Harrington's M Theory, and Why Structure Matters

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Tournament speed matters a lot. But getting into silly arguments about metrics is pointless. M is flawed, yeah, if you don't understand the nuances of tourney speed. But then so is your "True M". And going further than that, there really is no perfect metric ...

Does your "True M" take into account the short-handed tables that inevitably appear near the end of a tourney ? No, it does not.

Does it take into account the slower decision making processes that typically occur late in a tourney ? No, it does not.

Where your stack is at relative to the pre-cards table stakes, and where your stack is at relative to the rate-of-change of pre-cards table stakes, and even relative to the acceleration of pre-cards table stakes, are all important ...

But it is more an art than a science. Formulaic approaches do not work in and of themselves. You must play many, many tourneys to get a feel for the fine touch required.

When I first started playing inet tournies I wrote a C# program. Before the tourney starts, I enter the blind/ante levels, the # minutes into the tourney that each level occurs, the tourney start time, and my starting stack size, into my app's GUI.

As the tourney progresses, I frequently update my stack size and press "Calc". My program spits back M , M' , M'' (base M, velocity of M, and acceleration of M, respectively -- I only use discrete math to calculate M' and M'').

These metrics are not perfect (for many reasons, some of which I mentioned above) but I have found in practice that knowledge of M, M', M'' is sufficient to properly guage the approximate "inflection points" where I should ratchet up my aggression to the next notch. It's taken over 18 months, but I'm confident I do a better job of anticipating the need for incremented aggression vs the avg expert player.

My current project is to read the hand histories that FTP and PS provide and calculate an "estimated hands until busto" metric. But even when I have this metric available, I doubt I'll move away from my M, M', M'' metrics. I am very comfortable with them, having played over 1000 tournies with them available.

I'll bet the PokerTracker guys are working on similar metrics. Soon, everyone will have them.

But, once again, I'd like to emphasize that "devising a more perfect M" is really going down the wrong path when applying these concepts to your play. It's an art, not a science, and you need to track many different metrics and get a feel for them to derive real benefit.

(Note that financial traders have been doing this for decades to get a feel for where the markets might be headed next, and once again it's more of an art than a science.)

Arnold, it does seem that you have an ulterior motive in attacking Harrington, Malmuth, Sklansky, Zolotow, etc. You're playing a silly "I published it first" and/or "I published it right" game.

Trust me ... there are lots of guys like me (math/stat/compsci degrees and backgrounds) who thought of these concepts years ago and have applied them to our game in far greater sophistication than is published in any book.

I really don't understand why people think that because they are first to publish a concept that therefore they invented it.

Good luck hooking the masses on your "juice" ...

[curtains]

I used to always be very critical of M, but not for the reasons mentioned above. Mainly because it distorts the way I, and many other poker players, have looked at their stack sizes throughout time. For instance almost every sit and go player looks at their stack size in terms relative to the Big Blind. It's just too big of a chore to suddenly take everything you know and change to a new system, and I think that because most people use the # of BB's format, it really bothered a lot of people.

The plusside of "M" is that it has a built in mechanism for dealing with antes. So my solution to switch from M to # of BB's was to simply take 2/3rds of the antes, and add them to the BB. So if its 9 handed, and blinds are 200-400 with 50 ante, the effective blinds would actually be 350-700.

Of course there are some differences, but it basically works out pretty well, and I greatly prefer it to "M" because it means that all the work and math I've memorized throughout my career (which is all in # of BB's) doesn't have to be relearnt into some new system.

But yeah, a lot of people seem really anti-M. I know I was at first but I'm sure that the only reason for this was due to my history of looking at things in terms of #s of BBs. I can't think of any other logical reason to believe "M" to be stupid. Despite that I do believe that thinking about things in terms of #s of BB's is easier and should be adopted by pretty much everyone, but it could just be that I'm just too used to this method from years of experience.

[bustedromo]

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Here is a very quick explanation of why I don't believe structure matters in tournaments. Like I said before, whether or not playing a hand is profitable depends on a lot of factors, including current blinds, chips stacks, images/abilities of others and yourself, etc. But the fact that the blinds are going to go up in 5 minutes instead of 10 certainly doesn't change the cEV of a given play. So the only arguments in favour of structure mattering is that in fast structures you have to take -EV spots or in slow structures you should pass up +EV spots. I think there are spots where you should take -cEV spots if the blinds are about to go up if you'll lose your FE upon the blind increase. But these spots happen in all tournaments, regardless of structure; they just happen more often in fast structured ones. Passing +EV spots has been discussed many times, I think there are very few times it's correct. But regardless, your goal in every hand is still to maximize EV (where cEV is generally a very good approximation of $EV). How soon the blinds go up very rarely if ever impacts EV and thus structure of tournaments is irrelevant to proper strategies.

Steve

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The further a tourney progresses, the more important it becomes to maintain a stack capable of an effective amount of (all-in) FE -- and for many of the online tourneys where we make it into the 3+ hr, likely at some point we come to almost completely rely on our FE to survive.

Awareness of tournament structure/speed in the form of M,M',M'' gives you the ability to adjust your play to best avoid arriving at a situation where you have negligible or non-effective FE.

So, although tourney structure/speed only indirectly affects cEV of a given hand (and it does affect it indirectly, because other players' awareness of their M,M'M'' may affect their ranges), nonetheless tourney structure/speed does affect the range of cEV you optimally should be willing act upon (all other factors equal) in any given scenario.

Understanding your optimal risk profile for maintaining a stack-size capable of generating effective future FE is critical to maximizing your $EV. If at any point you are one of the largest stacks, it is unrealistic to expect to remain on the top. Forcing plays to keep you amongst the leaders is cEV- and $EV-. Rather, even with optimal play, random factors typically will move you down lower and lower. Knowing how to dynamically adjust your risk profile to optimize your chances of not falling too low is critical.

This does not mean that only at the point you are in serious danger of losing effective FE that you suddenly greatly expand your ranges. Rather, you must closely monitor M,M',M'' to well-anticipate the slide and when necessary judiciously and gradually adjust your risk-profile so as to add necessary variance.

Bottom line: tournament speed/structure matters a lot !

[curtains]

btw stevepa is right, I have very rarely made a decision because the blinds are going to go up soon. Ok it happens in very rare occasions, but most of the time it's meaningless.

[bustedromo]

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btw stevepa is right, I have very rarely made a decision because the blinds are going to go up soon. Ok it happens in very rare occasions, but most of the time it's meaningless.

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It's not just "the blinds are going to go up soon" ...

It's M versus M' versus M'' ... or if you don't like discrete derivatives, just calculate M for this round, next round, and the round after. Either way, after you play enough tournaments paying attention to either of these sets of metrics, you will learn to enhance your play accordingly. And eventually I guarantee that you will come around to my way of thinking.

My philosophy of poker is modeled on my philosophy of financials trading: if a tool is available, I understand it, and it's premise appears to be valid, then I am going to try it out. You need every edge you can get, and you'll never know about edges that a given tool can provide unless you try out that tool.

You probably are using a more intuitive, non-rigorous, application of M, M', M'' in your play but not aware of it. Most players are. That's part of being a great player, knowing when to step it up a gear. By taking on indicated additional risk (adding variance) earlier than others, you gain a significant advantage.

I could write more about the theory behind why this works, but this shouldn't be an academic theoretical argument. I'm not trying to win an argument. You should open your mind and try out these tools. I am sure you are looking for ways to improve your game.

[curtains]

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btw stevepa is right, I have very rarely made a decision because the blinds are going to go up soon. Ok it happens in very rare occasions, but most of the time it's meaningless.

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It's not just "the blinds are going to go up soon" ...

It's M versus M' versus M'' ... or if you don't like discrete derivatives, just calculate M for this round, next round, and the round after. Either way, after you play enough tournaments paying attention to either of these sets of metrics, you will learn to enhance your play accordingly. And eventually I guarantee that you will come around to my way of thinking.

My philosophy of poker is modeled on my philosophy of financials trading: if a tool is available, I understand it, and it's premise appears to be valid, then I am going to try it out. You need every edge you can get, and you'll never know about edges that a given tool can provide unless you try out that tool.

You probably are using a more intuitive, non-rigorous, application of M, M', M'' in your play but not aware of it. Most players are. That's part of being a great player, knowing when to step it up a gear. By taking on indicated additional risk (adding variance) earlier than others, you gain a significant advantage.

I could write more about the theory behind why this works, but this shouldn't be an academic theoretical argument. I'm not trying to win an argument. You should open your mind and try out these tools. I am sure you are looking for ways to improve your game.

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are you responding to me?