M As It Pertains To Satellite Play (if It Applies At All...)

[KappaKid83 0]

I was wondering what the thoughts were on applying M to satellite play, both Turbo and not, where there is a set amount of spots that are paid the same prize. I did not see any other topics on the subject, although I didnt look very hard. Thanks For The InsightJeff

[WhatArunAA 0]

I was wondering what the thoughts were on applying M to satellite play, both Turbo and not, where there is a set amount of spots that are paid the same prize. I did not see any other topics on the subject, although I didnt look very hard. Thanks For The InsightJeff

ive had decent success with satellites and I rarely ever think about M when it gets deep in tournies.. I think that inflection points are the most important thing in turbo- sats.

[copernicus 0]

ive had decent success with satellites and I rarely ever think about M when it gets deep in tournies.. I think that inflection points are the most important thing in turbo- sats.

Huh? Inflection points = transitions in M. Arent your two statements contradictory?In satellite play the main thing that changes when you are getting shortstacked is when you are a table or two away from the bubble.First, you have to make moves sooner than you would in a flatter payout, because even smaller stacks are going to call so they dont get in a position where they can be leveraged by the biggest stacks. Also, you want to attack the bigger stacks, because now they are the ones who are going to fold to protect what is a likely "in the money" finish.The dangerous stacks to make a move against are the middle stacks..just above and just below the projected bubble. They arent confident in winning a seat, they cant just hang on, and see a decent pot as the road to a seat, especially against a stack that leaves with some playing room if they lose. Conversely, those are the stacks that you want playing with you when you pick up a monster, because you can extract a good number of chips from them.

[shpaget 0]

Huh? Inflection points = transitions in M. Arent your two statements contradictory?In satellite play the main thing that changes when you are getting shortstacked is when you are a table or two away from the bubble.First, you have to make moves sooner than you would in a flatter payout, because even smaller stacks are going to call so they dont get in a position where they can be leveraged by the biggest stacks. Also, you want to attack the bigger stacks, because now they are the ones who are going to fold to protect what is a likely "in the money" finish.The dangerous stacks to make a move against are the middle stacks..just above and just below the projected bubble. They arent confident in winning a seat, they cant just hang on, and see a decent pot as the road to a seat, especially against a stack that leaves with some playing room if they lose. Conversely, those are the stacks that you want playing with you when you pick up a monster, because you can extract a good number of chips from them.

When you publish your book, I'm gonna buy it.

[gobears 0]

In satellite play the main thing that changes when you are getting shortstacked is when you are a table or two away from the bubble.First, you have to make moves sooner than you would in a flatter payout, because even smaller stacks are going to call so they dont get in a position where they can be leveraged by the biggest stacks. Also, you want to attack the bigger stacks, because now they are the ones who are going to fold to protect what is a likely "in the money" finish.The dangerous stacks to make a move against are the middle stacks..just above and just below the projected bubble. They arent confident in winning a seat, they cant just hang on, and see a decent pot as the road to a seat, especially against a stack that leaves with some playing room if they lose. Conversely, those are the stacks that you want playing with you when you pick up a monster, because you can extract a good number of chips from them.

This is good stuff - just be aware that some big stacks don't seem to understand the concept of "folding to a seat". I've seen some big stacks play the bully and go in almost every hand.Observation is key to winning a seat thru a Sat. You can truly see some awful play in Sats so don't assume that the players will be playing optimally.

[tskillz187 0]

This is good stuff - just be aware that some big stacks don't seem to understand the concept of "folding to a seat". I've seen some big stacks play the bully and go in almost every hand.Observation is key to winning a seat thru a Sat. You can truly see some awful play in Sats so don't assume that the players will be playing optimally.

Dutch Boyd wrote about attacking the big stacks, in one of his few insightful rants in his blog. Anyways, it is very important to make sure the big stack understands the principle as Gobears is pointing out. But, yeah, Cop stated it well.

[edge52 0]

The dangerous stacks to make a move against are the middle stacks..just above and just below the projected bubble. They arent confident in winning a seat, they cant just hang on, and see a decent pot as the road to a seat, especially against a stack that leaves with some playing room if they lose. Conversely, those are the stacks that you want playing with you when you pick up a monster, because you can extract a good number of chips from them.

Great post, intuitively your points seem to make sense assuming we can figure out who's playing semi-rationally and who's clueless. As you said, the 'projected bubble' as an important number to consider in satellite decision making. I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and it seems the 'projected bubble' (ie. chipstack of the last person to qualify when the tourney ends, let's call it "z") is helpful in deciding how risk-averse optimal play should be in a satellite. If your m is under 5 you can probably play normal, Harrington-advised high risk poker. On the other side, if you're the chip leader with only one person left to bust out, you can comfortable fold AA preflop. I've found that deciding where exactly I am on this "risk needed" spectrum is mostly guesswork, and I'm wondering how to make this decision more rational. Being able to calculate the 'z' for the tourney would certainly be helpful, as we'd then know about how many chips we need to win a seat. This is impossible to know until the tourney is over, but I'm thinking we can figure out an approximation, let's start with:total number of tourney entrants x starting chip stack / number of seats awarded = average chip stack of seat winnersTo win a seat though we don't even need an average chip stack, we just need one more chip than the person who finishes on the bubble. Now this is the part where I'm confused...using statistics, could we figure out roughly what the 'z' would be? Say if we knew the standard deviation of chip stacks is fairly consistent from tourney to tourney? We could figure this out with some data mining right?Anyway, I'm thinking if the stats stuff does work, maybe we could end up with a formula like:Z (number of chips needed to win a seat) = average chip stack of seat winners x 0.5or something, and use the z figure to help us decide how risk averse we need to play.P.S. Sorry for the really long and probably not that clear post, I was going to make a new topic on this but found the OP's topic to be right on point with my idea.

[copernicus 0]

Great post, intuitively your points seem to make sense assuming we can figure out who's playing semi-rationally and who's clueless. As you said, the 'projected bubble' as an important number to consider in satellite decision making. I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and it seems the 'projected bubble' (ie. chipstack of the last person to qualify when the tourney ends, let's call it "z") is helpful in deciding how risk-averse optimal play should be in a satellite. If your m is under 5 you can probably play normal, Harrington-advised high risk poker. On the other side, if you're the chip leader with only one person left to bust out, you can comfortable fold AA preflop. I've found that deciding where exactly I am on this "risk needed" spectrum is mostly guesswork, and I'm wondering how to make this decision more rational. Being able to calculate the 'z' for the tourney would certainly be helpful, as we'd then know about how many chips we need to win a seat. This is impossible to know until the tourney is over, but I'm thinking we can figure out an approximation, let's start with:total number of tourney entrants x starting chip stack / number of seats awarded = average chip stack of seat winnersTo win a seat though we don't even need an average chip stack, we just need one more chip than the person who finishes on the bubble. Now this is the part where I'm confused...using statistics, could we figure out roughly what the 'z' would be? Say if we knew the standard deviation of chip stacks is fairly consistent from tourney to tourney? We could figure this out with some data mining right?Anyway, I'm thinking if the stats stuff does work, maybe we could end up with a formula like:Z (number of chips needed to win a seat) = average chip stack of seat winners x 0.5or something, and use the z figure to help us decide how risk averse we need to play.P.S. Sorry for the really long and probably not that clear post, I was going to make a new topic on this but found the OP's topic to be right on point with my idea.

For a normal MTT paying about 10% of the seats, the "in the money bubble" is usually pretty close to the size of the stack in the first money position when the total number of remaining players is about 25-30% of the starting number (ie 2.5-3x the number of payouts). Eg. if there are 180 runners, paying 18 seats, the ultimate bubble stack is about the same size as the 18th stack when there are 45-54 left.That also tends to be on the order of 1/3 to 1/2 of the average stack at bubble time, depending on whether a small number of players are running away with the chips or the distribution is more even.There will be variation in the bubble stack vs average stack depending on how deep the starting stacks are and how fast the blind structure moves as well (which makes generalization into a forumula difficult). Since satellites tend to be shallower stacked and faster blinds, and the big stacks dont give up chips easily, I would think that a satellite bubble stack would be somewhat smaller as a % of average than the MTT ratio.Of course if its a freeroll or FPP satellite, with very few seats relative to the number of runners, and play early on is somewhat crazy leading to some very large stacks early on, all of the above can probably be disregarded.