Book it, Snyder

As I wrote here, I've decided to start re-reading Arnold Snyder's book The Tournament Poker Formula 2, which focuses on larger buy-in, higher PF tournaments like the WSOP MTTs. I did just that on a recent airplane flight I took across the Pacific. The first time I tried reading this book, I found it a tough go because Snyder stands conventional wisdom on its head, and asked the reader to abandon a lot of ideas that I, frankly, had previously fully embraced and believed. In a sense, it was hard to let these ideas go, keep an open mind, and really read Snyder's words.

But this time I think I'm able to keep that open mind, and, frankly, I'm becoming a convert. Like his first book, this is an excellent, thought provoking book that marches to it's own beat. Snyder isn't afraid to call other poker authors out by name (e.g., David Sklansky) and argue that they're completely wrong in their analyses of poker tournaments, especially when it comes to chip-EV (cEV) and the whole Independent Chip Model (ICM) approach to developing a tournament strategy. I have to say I was skeptical about these claims at first, because, well, we're talking about David Freaking Sklansky. How can he possibly be wrong? 

Snyder contends that thinking about the cEV of a tournament chip is silly.  Assigning a monetary "worth" to each chip can lead you to erroneous conclusions that hamstring you from accumulating those chips. You become more focused on conserving your stack than building. Instead, Snyder argues, you need to think of tournament chips as "ammunition," which means that the more of them you have, the more can do with them. If you've got only one bullet, you have to be really careful with it, and use it only in the best possible situation. But if you have two bullets, suddenly you have two or more options at your disposal, so it's more valuable to gain chips than conserve them. In other words, a bigger stack allows you to cbet, bet for info*, fire multiple barrels, etc., which in turn means you can use more of your poker skills than if you have a shorter stack. He calls this concept "chip utility," and the logical conclusion of assuming this is that a chip won is worth more than a chip lost. This is obviously the opposite conclusion if one employs the ICM approach to MTTs.

Snyder also draws clear distinctions between cash and MTTs, and thinks that "math heads" as he calls them don't appreciate this fact enough, and that they spend too much time focused on pot odds and such, instead of focusing on chip utility and the desperation factors of your opponents.. He also says there is a difference between poker skills and tournament skills that matters a lot in these analyses, and writers like Sklansky and the authors of books like Kill Phil don't fully understand or appreciate these differences.

I'm only four chapters in, but by the time I return home early Saturday morning I will have finished this book. I enjoy having my personal envelope pushed by writers like Snyder, and this book is thus far chock full of gold.

On to the next installment in the WSOP journey...

All-in for now....

-Bug

*Snyder also argues against another long-held belief of this Bug that betting for information is OK. While I still don't believe it's a valid reason to bet in a cash game, Snyder does make a reasonable argument that in tourneys it's fine to do. I'm still not fully sold on this one, but I am thinking... and this is always a good thing.

MTT Patience Factor

In Arnold Snyder's book The Poker Tournament Formula, he writes in the first chapter about something called the Patience Factor. This term is a measure of how fast a tournament moves/blinds escalate compared to how many chips each player starts with. The lower the PF, the less skill is involved in winning the tournament; conversely, the higher the PF, the less luck comes into play and the more skill is required to go deep.

In short, his formula is essentially just the square of the so-called "blind-off" time; i.e., the time it would take to bust out due to blinding off, assuming you never played a single hand. For instance, let's assume we're going to play in a tournament with the following blind structure:

Assuming that each player began this tournament with T1000, we can see that somewhere between level 3 and 4, the cumulative cost of paying the blinds would exceed the initial stack size, and a player who was auto-mucking* would get blinded off at this point. Specifically, the player would get blinded off 1.3 hours into the tournament**. Squaring this figure*** gives us a PF of 1.6.

Once you have calculated the PF, you can estimate how much skill or luck a particular tournament will have in it, and therefore compare tourneys and find one best suited to your own abilities. Here's Snyder's chart that lists PF vs. Skill Level:

Note that this chart is only for live play; online play is significantly faster (read: more hands per hour). Per Snyder, the way to account for this is to multiply the online blind level time by the ratio of hands dealt per hour online to that of live. In other words, if we assume that the average hands per hour dealt online in a tournament is 50, and the average live is 30, then we multiple the online blind period by 50/30 to get an "adjusted" blind level period. This figure is then run through the spreadsheet and the new, adjusted PF can be plugged into the chart above to see how bad of a crapshoot the tourney is or isn't. Makes sense.

All-in for now...
-Bug
*We're assuming here that the player never gets a walk in the big blind.
**I'll leave it to the reader to figure out for themselves how to do this calculation. It's pretty straightforward to do, and in fact I put it into a spreadsheet format so I can calculate different tourneys and compare them. You might consider doing the same.
***Snyder squares the tournament time to blind-off simply to make the differences between values more accentuated. Strange, but whatever.