One of the main concepts to take away from this book is Magriel’s M and how to apply it.

“The most important single number that governs your play towards the end of tournaments is M, which is simply the ratio of your stack to the current total of blinds and antes”.

The vast majority of poker players will have heard of “M” and most will be able to tell you what it is and how to calculate it. However, it seems to be increasingly common for tournament players to be discussing hands in terms of “bbs”. If there was an industry standard for structures this would be fine, but there are even subtle differences in the size of antes on Full Tilt and Poker Stars.

If we delve deeper and look at the structures on the European friendly sites the differences are staggering; Party Poker’s antes are almost negligible and appear almost as an afterthought whereas ipoker’s antes can add up to 50% more than the bb. The size of antes in live play also differs dramatically from casino to casino, some still not using antes at all but others having enormous antes, often due to the size of chips available and dealers’ eagerness to colour up the chips at the earliest point they can.

The standard size of an ante is around 10% of the big blind. Therefore an M of 5 for example usually = 12-13bbs. But as discussed, there is actually no industry standard.

To use an extreme example let’s compare ipoker and Party, and look at a specific situation where using the number of bbs you have to determine your play can be disastrous.

At the 300/600 level in the ipoker daily rebuys the ante is 100. Therefore at a 10 handed table there’s 1900 in the pot before any action takes place.

If you had an M of 5 this would be 9500 chips = 15.83 bbs

At the 800/1600 level on Party the ante is 50. Therefore at a 10 handed table there’s 2900 in the pot before any action takes place.

If you had an M of 5 this would be 14500 chips = 9.06 bbs.

The difference is clearly huge. Shoving the button with 9bbs on Party nets you the same gain as shoving the button with 16bbs on ipoker at this level.

If we were using 12bbs as being an M of 5, we’d actually be shoving an M of 6.6 on Party and an M of 3.8 on ipoker.

On Pokerxfactor.com Sheets has put up a very handy tool for calculating what hands you need to have for shoving particular M’s from particular positions based on the Nash Equilibrium¹

It’s great as a guideline, but be aware that just because something is +ev it may not be optimal. Ie shoving with an M of 10 on Party could be shoving 32bbs so a plethora of other options are available.

Also calling ranges will differ from site to site, it’s easy to see why the bb’s calling range of a 9bb shove on Party will be different from the bb’s calling range of a 16bb shove on ipoker.

Using the number of big blinds you have to determine your shoving range can be a massive leak, taking a second or two to calculate your M will benefit your game greatly.

That Harrington fella knew what he was talking about.

It’s been a bloody long time since I last updated my blog. How long exactly, I’m not sure and to be honest I can’t be bothered checking, but long enough to make it difficult to find something to write about. It’s like when you haven’t seen a good friend in a long time you should have a ton to talk about but for the first few minutes you struggle a little to find conversation points. That’s my excuse anyway for the abomination of this introduction, and presumably also my excuse for the rest of this entry. Bad-mouthing my own work before I’ve even put pen to paper, I’ve sunk to a new low.

Anyway…..

I took a trip across the ditch to Melbourne in January for the Aussie Millions and came back (rather predictably) empty handed. As with all of these trips I had a great time, but spent a lot of money in doing so. I also had the standard epiphany that I experience whenever I go away for any period of time and spend shed loads of money. This epiphany is basically always the same – I’m going to get back home and get my head down and work hard… I always have the best of intentions, but my work ethic usually doesn’t last that long. So 7 weeks on, how have I done? Let’s look at the numbers.

I’ve played poker on 22 days out of 47.

I’ve played 689 tournaments with an average buy in of $156.31.

I’ve run @ 5.44% roi making $5544.50.

Obviously I’d like to have been more successful over this period, but I really can’t complain about running badly, especially over this kind of sample.

I’ve just picked these stats from my google document. Poker-Allies sponsored players have been using google docs to track their tournament results since October. There’s been some teething problems but we’re almost there and I’d like to thank our head of IT Steven Hillson for putting up with our annoying requests over the past few months and creating connected documents that give us access to statistics on our players as a group. We’re now able to see Poker-Allies sponsored players’ ROI by site and of course across the board at a glance. Amongst other things, this allows us to estimate profitability of certain tournaments for certain players and to be able to gauge their expected ROI to a much more accurate range than ever possible before.

Away from Poker, another part of my epiphany was that I was going to get fit and try to play football to a decent level, although strictly speaking I had already decided this prior to the Aussie Millions.

I have much better things to report on this front, I’ve lost about 4kgs (8.8 pounds) and am feeling pretty fit. Unfortunately I’m still in the reserve squad, but I think I should be pushing for a place in the 1sts in the next couple of weeks, if not I think I’ll enjoy playing for the 2nds because I’ve managed to bullshit my way into play attacking centre midfield, whereas if I make my way to the 1sts it will likely be as a left back.

So that’s about it, been pretty short really. Having done this entry though I feel like I can follow it up quickly with an offering more focused on poker. I’ll be playing the next few days and I’m sure I’ll find a few concepts to blether about. Hopefully I’ll also be motivated to write a couple of articles as well. I’ve actually written one on combating good regs on Ongame and ipoker with an aggressive preflop strategy, I haven’t looked at it in a couple of months though, so probably needs some editing. On top of that I’ll discuss my (lack of) Vegas plans and probably just re-iterate my distaste for live tournaments in general.

Until then, good luck.

It’s just over a month since I left Vegas and in that month I played very little poker. For the most part I was travelling around the UK catching up with friends and family. I have no real idea of the next time I’ll be in Europe, so was important for me to see as many people as I could.

Fast forward to current time, and I’m sat in a crap hotel room in Macau trying to order room service at 5am. The menu clearly says “24 hour room service”, so I chose a tuna sandwich and made the call. No one is picking up, so I’ll just add my room service woes to the list of “run bads” I’ve had on this trip.

1) Flight delayed in Manchester, missed connection in Dubai, had to hang around for 8 hours
2) APT hotel was full apart from a pricey suite that was only available the night I got there.
3) APT accommodated me as a player in the hotel, but only for 2 nights.
4) All other hotels full apart from the dive across the road.
5) In room internet is about as stable as gobboboy on a unicycle.
6) Oh and yeah – I got rivered in the APT.

As a friend pointed out to me, I should be happy with all of these “beats” because it means I must be saving up some luck for the APPT next week. Let’s hope that’s the case…

There were just over 300 runners in the APT, and predictably the field was super soft. Not quite up there with WPT Venice, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I ran my stack up from 10k to 30k pretty easily then managed to find 3 or 4 spots that caused me to haemorrhage chips and dropped to around 15k. I should clarify, they weren’t bad spots, just ran into a few hands, on the whole I played pretty well. My busto hand, a local guy in his 30s opened in mid to 2700 @ 400/800/100. I looked down at 88 and figured it was as good a spot as any to get my 14k in. I shoved he thought for 20 seconds or so and called with AQ. As you are aware he hit the queen on the river, and yes I know that doesn’t really count as “getting rivered” it was all in preflop and I was a mighty 55% favourite or whatever, but it was the river damnit!

After busting and having the hassle with moving hotels, all I could think about was getting back to New Zealand. But upon reflection I have realised that there is still work to be done here, and I have another tournament to concentrate on.

New Zealand – yes, I’m going back and I really can’t wait to get my life back on track. For the last four months it’s been so unstructured. I’ve played hardly any online poker, made very little money and spent a fortune. If it wasn’t for one Sunday in June (thanks Jason) I’d be really feeling it.

Neil isn’t coming this time around, but my mate Mike (thebeej) is, and Shaun (mathclub) is moving in as well. A couple of other poker players will likely be staying for a while too. Another person who isn’t coming back is Dominique – our dear friend and “rent a mum” who looked after us so well last year. Who’s going to make my morning smoothies?

“Beeeeej? There’s too much banana in this!”

Of course, that won’t happen, you can never have too much banana.