Dial M for Poker

This is the second installment of Pocket Quads, my bi-monthly column on poker for Cardplayer India. It appears in the issue dated January-February 2011.

I must be the worst tourist ever: in the second half of 2010, I went to Goa half a dozen times and never saw a beach. I suspect there are many others like me, for whom Goa conjures up images not of the sun and the sand and the awesome food, but of full houses and quads and grown men banging tables as they’re delivered yet another bad beat. A decade from now, 2010 might well be remembered as the year Indian poker started coming of age. Goa is the epicentre of that.

This is especially so when it comes to tournament poker. High stakes cash games now abound in all the Indian metros, but if you want to play regular well-organised tournaments, there’s no place yet quite like Casino Royale. I’ve played multiple editions of the IPC, the IPS and the Aces Unlimited Tourneys there, reaching seven final tables out of about twice that number, and the turnout keeps growing at a staggering pace. The quality of play has gone up at the final tables—but so, I’m afraid to say, has the amount of donkamental play before that.

At the last IPC tourney I played, four of the first six hands dealt at my table saw all-in moves. Almost a fourth of the hands dealt in the first two levels saw someone moving all-in. (The only time I called one, my KK got busted by KTo.) The game can become a bit bingoish when the blinds go up too fast (though I’d contend there is much skill involved there as well), but it was sick to see such wild play so early in the tourney, when everyone at the table had between 50 to 100 big blinds. It also made me wonder what these rinse-and-repeat all-in pushers thought the game was all about. Perhaps they’d learnt their poker from Facebook, or even television, where selected hands shown from the last stages of tourneys feature a much higher percentage of shoves than you actually see in actual play.

To be successful in the long run in tournaments, though, it isn’t enough to be fearless enough to shove every time you think you’ve been dealt a good hand. Poker is about situations and the people you’re playing with, and the cards you’re dealt are just a small part of the puzzle. In a tournament, context is important. And to understand context, you need to keep in mind, always, during every single hand that you play, your M Ratio.

This is not complex mathematical jargon. The M Ratio is a number that is, quite simply, the figure you come up with when you divide your stack by the cost of a round. (The term was popularised by Dan Harrington in his series of great books on tournament poker; the CSI, or Chip Status Index, is an independent formulation by Lee Nelson and Blair Rodman that means the same thing.) For example, if you start a tourney with 5000 chips, and the blinds are 25 and 50, the cost of a round is 75 and your M is 5000/75, which is 66.6. If your stack is 10,000 and the blinds are 400 and 800, with antes of 100 on a nine handed table, the cost of a round is 2100, and you have an M of 4.8. These two situation require drastically different kinds of play, and while it is correct to go all-in with AQ with an M of 4.8, it would be moronic to do so with an M of 66.

Basically, the higher your M, the more play you have in the tournament. When your M is over 20, you can afford to play speculative hands, but it is pointless to commit too much to the pot without a seriously good holding: the risk-to-reward ratio just isn’t worth it. This is a good time to play suited connectors, suited gappers and small pairs—because you are deep-stacked, and so, presumably, are your opponents, you have the implied hands to play hands like those. When you hit a set or a straight, you are quite likely to bust a high pocket pair, as many players find it impossible to let AA or KK go on a 89T flop with two to a flush.

There are two approaches to playing with deep stacks in a tournament. The old-school, classical approach is to play really tight, wait for premium hands, and not try fancy moves. A newer, more aggressive approach, exemplified by the likes of Gus Hansen and Daniel Negreanu, is to play lots of hands very cheap, try to outplay more conventional opponents on the flop, and build your stack by using the power of your deep stack, instilling fear in your opponents, who are scared of taking too many risks early. The old-school player, if he starts with AsJs and sees a flop of 9TJ with two hearts and a player pushing all-in, will consider folding, given how wet the flop is. The aggro internet pro, if he has 67o with one heart on such a flop, puts his opponent on AJ, and senses fear, will gladly raise and reraise as a semi-bluff to get top pair to fold. Depending on where you come from, both the AJ fold and the 67o push make sense.

The aggressive players can go bust early, but they can also become chip leaders on the final table, because they know how to accumulate lots of chips without putting their entire stack at risk. The conventional players are less likely to go bust early, and if they loosen up as the blinds rise and their M goes down, they’ll do just fine. If you’re a beginning player, and are less likely to outplay other players after the flop, I recommend you stick to the conventional style: play tight when your M is high, and loosen up as your M comes down.

When your M reaches 15 and below, speculative hands lose value, and you’re better off playing more premium hands. For example, if you have 22,000 chips with blinds/antes of 400/800/100, you have an M of just over 10, and a standard raise to three times the big blind would be 2400. If you have, say, 89s, it doesn’t make sense to call a raise for more than a tenth of your stack. That hand would be good for a call if you had a M of, say 30, with high implied odds. The same logic applies to small pairs. You’ll hit a set once in eight hands, but your implied odds need to be far more than 8 to 1 because very often you won’t get paid off. (For example, if you have 33, the opponent has KK, and the flop comes A32, the A is a scare card for him.) As a rule of thumb, I play small pockets when I have implied odds of 15 to 1, or a really small M—but we’ll come to that.

When your M goes below 10, you’re in the danger zone. You have to play your premium hands strongly, use position without fear, and take a few risks to take your M higher. If you have an M of 6 and everyone folds to you on the button, for example, and you look down at A8o, you might want to shove here. Unless the small blind or the big blind are also either short-stacked or desperate, or really deep-stacked, they are unlikely to call: their chances of having a better ace or pockets are negligible, and the situation demands that you take the risk. Early in the tournament, it is unadvisable to play a marginal hand like A8o; but desperate times call for desperate measures.

By the time your M reaches 5, you have only two moves in your arsenal: all-in or fold. If your M gets any lower, your stack will be so small that you won’t have fold equity left: with an M of 2, you’re practically guaranteed a caller when you go all-in. So you have to make your moves right away. Any pocket pair or medium ace or two face cards could be good for a push here. One important principle to remember, though, is that you should always try to be first to the pot with whatever move you make, unless you have a truly premium holding: KJo is good to make a move with if you’re first to the pot, but you should probably fold it if two other people with similar stacks have gone all in before you.

Naturally, the M Ratio is a very basic concept, and there are hazaar situational complexities to consider during a journey through a tournament. You have to consider the other players at the table, your table image, your position during every hand, the stage the tournament is in (during the bubble, when most players are scared of not making the money, it pays to be aggressive and steal blinds and antes), and so on. But without keeping in mind your M Ratio, you will not know where you stand in the greater scheme of things, and are likely to miss making the optimal play. So do remember the key to success: Dial M for Poker.

And yeah, the next time you go all in preflop on my table in the first hand of the tournament with KTo, and make me fold AQs, I will rise from my chair and physically kick your ass. Be warned!