Survival Time. A tournament's blind structure can determine how patient you should be. Although you can't just wait for aces and hope to double up, you can exercise patience with slow-moving blind structures and pick your spots. But with fast blind structures, you need to force the action-even in marginal situations.
The variable that defines a tournament's speed is your survival time-the number of hands you'll be dealt before you blind and ante yourself out of the game. Dan Harrington's M factor, made famous in Harrington on Hold'em Vol. 2, is a survival time estimator. To calculate your M factor, divide the size of your stack by the cost to play an orbit-blinds plus antes-at the current level. A player's M factor is the number of survivable orbits at the current level.
Unfortunately, the M factor doesn't account for increasing blinds. Your actual survival time, in orbits, is less than that given by the M factor, but a very high portion of multi-table tournament players are still disciples of M. Furthermore, many of them eschew slight edges, thinking they have ample time to wait for better, lower risk opportunities.
If you're an M disciple, you might not have as much time as you think. You're often better off taking all the slight edges you can get, especially in tournaments with fast blind structures. To my knowledge, Arnold Snyder, author of The Poker Tournament Formula and The Poker Tournament Formula 2, was the first who thoroughly dissected the issue of tournament survival time and went toe-to-toe against 2+2, in much the same way as Galileo went toe-to-toe against the Roman Catholic Church when he challenged the geocentric view of the solar system.
Here's how to calculate tournament survival time:
1. Determine the average number of chips lost per hand for each level:
sb is the amount of the small blind, bb is the amount of the big blind, N is the average number of players at the table (including you), and A is the ante.
2. Determine the number of chips lost per level: H is the number of hands played per level.
3. Add the chips lost per level until you get a number that's bigger than your stack size. At that point, you've found the level where you'd blind out. To find out how many hands you play at this level, find out how many chips you'd have going into this level and then divide by the number of chips lost per hand in the level where you'd get knocked out.
Suppose you have T2,000 starting chips in an ultra-turbo tournament with the following 5-minute blind levels:
Level 1: T50-T100
Level 2: T75-T150
Level 3: T100-T200
Level 4: T150-T300
Level 5: T200-T400
Level 6: T250-T500
Level 7: T300-T600
Level 8: T400-T800
Assuming that you play 1 hand per minute at tables that are 10-handed, you lose the following number of chips in each blind level:
Level 1: T75
Level 2: T112.5
Level 3: T150
Level 4: T225
Level 5: T300
Level 6: T375
Level 7: T450
Level 8: T600
Through level 7, you lose T1687.5 chips, meaning that you have 312.5 chips going into level 8. In level 8, you lose T120 per hand, so on average, you get to see 26 hands in level 8. Your total survival time for this tournament is 37.6 hands.
When your survival time is this short, you need to act fast. But survival time alone doesn't tell you when to enter the pre-flop shove or fold mode. If your stack is deeper than about nine big blinds, it's too deep for opening all-in, and your raises should be 2.5 to 3 big blinds, regardless of survival time.
Though survival time doesn't tell you how to play your hands, it's important because missing even a tiny opening is a huge mistake when your time is short.
Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker By The Numbers, Killer Poker Shorthanded (with John Vorhaus), and Tournament Killer Poker by the Numbers. He also hosts Killer Poker Analysis on Rounder's Radio (www. roundersradio.com). Visit him at www.killerev.com.
