Chip Utility

So today I've been looking forward to writing some more about the concept of chip utility that I introduced yesterday, which again comes directly out of Arnold Snyder's great book The Poker Tournament Formula II. As I mentioned yesterday, this is the only poker book I have ever read that specifically addresses the concept of chip utility in this way, although my suspicion is that, like myself, most of the truly good tournament players in the world have an excellent subconcious understanding and feel for the concept in their hand-to-hand play in poker tournaments.

So, to recap, chip utility according to Arnold Snyder is the amount of usefulness or utility a skilled player can expect to get out of the chips that he or she holds in a poker tournament. To Snyder, and this is something I agree with very well, one really needs a good 100 big blinds or more in your stack in order to truly have what Snyder calls "full utility". Full utility means that you have all of your weapons available to you in terms of what moves or tournament strategies you have sufficient chips to make. For example, let's say you are half an hour in to the typical single-stack full tilt poker tournament starting with your standard 1500 chips, and you have yet to win a pot but have raised a couple of times preflop, and called one raise preflop, all three times only to have to fold to overcards and action on the flop. So let's say you're down to 1100 chips thirty minutes in to this tournament, and the blinds here near the end of Round 3 are now 20-40. So with 1100 chips, you have about 27 big blinds.

The first thing to note about chip utility is that it provides quite different analyses of the power of chip stacks than does Dan Harrington in his own awesome books (Volume 1 and 2, anyways) on poker touraments. According to Harrington, nearly 30 big blinds is not huge, but it is way far away from the "desperate" area that I believe Harrington describes as 10 big blinds are less. Now it's not that I (and Arnold Snyder) disagree that fewer than 10 big blinds equals desperation -- clearly, it does -- but the argument here is that even with 27 big blinds, you're not actually in the yellow zone or whatever Harrington calls this level of M. In reality, with 27 big blinds, your chip utility pretty much sucks, and your play should reflect this fact even at this level. Anyone who continues to play tightydonk Harrington-style poker with just 27 big blinds is pretty much wasting their time when they have very little utility left to the chip stack they currently have. Here's why:

With 27 big blinds, 1100 chips and blinds of 20-40, think about all the things you can't do that you'd like to be able to do if you are a skilled tournament poker player. Can you still open-raise the blinds preflop from late position on a pure steal with, say, J8o? Sure. The action folds to you, you bump it up to 120 chips. That's fine. Even that is already more than 10% of your current stack, but you do have enough chips to be able to still put in a standard preflop raise and still be able to fold to a reraise. Barely.

But we are already close to the end of your possible moves with just 27 big blinds at the start of a hand. Think about it. What if your preflop raise to 120 chips gets called by the big blind. So now there is 300 chips in the pot and you see a flop, say it's all rags and it misses your steal attempt entirely. With just 980 chips left in your stack at this point, can you credibly c-bet now, putting in maybe 220 chips into this 300-chip pot? So to c-bet here will take nearly 25% of your remaining stack, and with any further action you are obviously 100% committed to this pot with your crappy hand. I suppose you can go with the c-bet and just hope you get a fold. But make no mistake, if you get raised on the flop, you're committed and done. If you even get called on the flop, you're done. You have no more chips and your current chip stack will then be less than what is already in the pot before the turn card even comes out. You won't have enough chips to make any kind of a real, credible bet at that point in the hand. You're out. Your chip stack was barely big enough with 27 big blinds to be able to play any postflop poker at all.

Taking it a step further, let's reverse the scenario for a minute. Say you are in the big blind with your 27 bb's remaining, and the button raises your 40-chip big blind to 120 chips, and you have that 1060 chips remaining in your stack. Can you resteal here? Let's assume a standard resteal of, say, 3 times the steal-raise ahead of you. That means you need to put in 360 chips of the 1060 you have remaining, which again already is more than a third of your existing stack. Yes, you can resteal here, but that's it. Once you are called (or reraised), you don't have the chippage left to do anything credible at all after the flop comes down.

Looking at one more point, let's say the button raises to 120 and you opt to just call his 120-chip bet from your big blind, leaving you with 980 chips remaining to see a flop. Now you check the raggy flop and opponent does his standard c-bet of say, 160 chips into the 260-chip pot on the flop. You can't even really credibly smooth call this bet and hope to steal on the turn. To do so would cost you 160 chips of the 980 you have left, and would leave 580 chips in the pot to see the turn card. Then on the turn with 580 chips you have just 820 chips remaining. I guess you can play it this way, but once again you can't possibly put any moves on anyone credibly after the flop.

The overall point that Snyder makes so well in The Poker Tournament Formula II here is that it is crucially important to always maintain full utility, or as close to full utility as possible, in order for a skilled player to be able to really exercise all of his poker skills in a tournament. You can be the best player of all time -- Stu Ungar, Doyle Brunson, Hellmuth, Ivey, you name it -- but if these guys only have 20 or 30 big blinds at any point in a tournament, they cannot effectively exhibit that skill. They just can't. The weapons in the arsenal have been significantly diminished because their chip utility is so small at that point. Sure, Ivey may have a good read on you that you're bluffing. But if he can't credibly float-call you on the flop and again on the turn because his chip stack is simply not close to big enough to support such moves in a credible way, then he will not be able to anywhere near maximize the number of chips he can extract from you on that hand. Doyle may have a great read on you that you are just restealing a late position stealer preflop from the small blind, but if he has limped in from early position, he simply does not have the chips to re-resteal you in any credible way, in a situation where if he had 100 big blinds at the start of the hand he can be totally positive that he could get you to fold. But he can't get you to fold with just 27 big blinds sitting in his stack at the start of the hand.

That is what the theory of chip utility is all about. As I mentioned yesterday and as I will be writing about in future posts I am quite sure, the theory of chip utility is most interesting to me in the ways that it tends to call into question some of the previously (in my view, anyways) accepted views of very well-known and well-respected poker authors. I already mentioned above how Harrington's M analysis seems to grossly understate the number of big blinds you need in your hand to avoid being "desperate" in tournament terms. But when you think about chip utility from a "Gap concept" perspective, that entire way of thinking also is called entirely into questions in poker tournaments, something I may write more about next week. On Monday I am also planning to write a little about what Snyder calls "utility odds" as an alternative calculation to the totally-accepted notion of using "pot odds" or even "implied odds" when making call-or-fold decisions in tournaments. Snyder makes some brazen conclusions on the utility odds front, which I will discuss more next week and which I think ought to make a lot of you think hard about tournament poker, if you're the type of people looking to and open to questioning such things.

The overall point of today's post is to say that, generally speaking, you really need something close to 100 big blinds in your stack in order to have full chip utility, or the ability to easily and credibly use every type of move normally available in a skilled poker player's arsenal. Information bets, information bluffs, preflop resteals, re-restealing from restealers, float-calls on the flop, float-calls on the turn, check-raising the turn, bluff-raising the river, etc. 100 big blinds gives you the ammunition you need to credibly be able to make all the moves a skilled player can normally make in a tournament, while anything less than 100 bb's starts to eat away at the margins of this freedom to do whatever you want in a given hand. Typically it's the ability to make the later-street moves that disappears first, along with the reraising later in the hand, with the last thing to go normally being the preflop allin move. But the point to take away from this all today is that the truly skilled mtt players either subconsciously or consciously understand well this concept of chip utility, and they will do whatever it takes -- including making some often seemingly questionable decisions -- to try to get their stacks up to (or back up to) full utility as early in tournaments as they can, so that they can really open up their games and seriously disrupt the other players at their table.

More on this next week. Have a great weekend everyone, I am glad to be back writing here these days. Have you bought Snyder's books yet?

The Return

Well, I'm back. Two days of orientation at my new job have come and gone, and on Thursday I will head to my real office for the first real day at my new employer. The move to our new house also went off pretty much without a hitch, the first move I would ever describe as "ok" or maybe even "pleasant". Not only did nothing get broken or go missing or anything, but in the end the price even came in under their estimate. Yes, New Yorkers, you read that right! They came in under estimate, mostly due to my having made several trips myself to and from the new house over the few days preceding our move, but I've always done that in the past as well and that's never stopped these fuckers from charging whateverthefuck they wanted to, hundreds of dollars for boxes, packing tape, fuel surcharges, you name it. So things are progressing well on that front and my life is slowly inching back towards normal for the first time in many, many months.

Unfortunately, all this shit over the past week has kept me from making a proper poker post here. But fortunately, a 35-minute commute each way on the train has left me with plenty of time to read and think about poker again, for the first time in quite a while actually, and that's what I'm really here to write about today.

Only once in a long while these days it seems, a poker book comes along that really makes a mark. So much literature has been written already as a result of the poker boom of the past five years or so that the truly game-changing poker books -- the Super/System's, the Harrington's -- are very few and far between. And that's not at all to say that there are no other worthwhile poker books out there; far from it, I've written much here about a great many books that I've gotten between something and a lot out of as far as my game goes. But I'm talking about the ones that really are the difference makers. And as I've said, nowadays that is a pretty rare thing.

Which brings me to my point today. Several months ago, on jeciimd's recommendation in fact, I read and wrote about Arnold Snyder's book The Poker Tournament Formula. Well, today I am here to say that I am a good way's in to the sequel to this book, and unlike so many of the recent poker books where the sequel is clearly made purely as a Matrix Revolutions-style money grab, the second Poker Tournament Formula is so far even better than the first. In fact, it is chock full of very thought-provoking ideas and strategy tidbits that frankly I had never quite thought about in the way that Snyder presents them. I am maybe a third of the way through the book at this point, and I already have at least a week's worth of blog posts coming just from ideas presented in the book, or things I have thought about as I have analyzed what I am reading in the book.

In a nutshell, Snyder's overall concept in the book thus far is that of tournament chip utility. This concept is absolutely essential to any poker tournament, and this is the key idea that has not in my view been expounded upon, or even recognized at all, really in any other poker book I have ever read (and I've read most of them). In a nutshell, Snyder uses the term chip utility to refer to the amount of utility, or usefulness, one can get from one's chip stack at any given time in a tournament. As someone with a modicum of tournament success myself, I have to agree 100% with this concept, and with the conclusions that Snyder draws from using the concept, even (and to me, most interestingly) where they flat-out disagree or contradict with other popular poker authors' thoughts on poker tournament strategies. The basic idea behind chip utility is that a skilled tournament player derives much more benefit from having what Snyder calls "full utility" -- that is, say 100 big blinds or more and the largest stack at one's table -- than just having that number of chips itself. Having full chip utility is worth so much more to a skilled tournament player because it allows him or her to use his or her chips as freely as possible, truly opening up the arsenal of moves one has the room to make to include all possible moves like raising preflop with connectors and then c-betting regularly, float-calling another c-bet on the flop to try to steal on the turn, betting for information on the flop, raising the flop "to find out where you're at", etc. With less than 100 big blinds, argues Snyder, these various weapons in a tournament entrant's arsenal begin to disappear, until down to 20-30 big blinds where in most cases one's only real option is to push allin preflop, or maybe in certain circumstances to raise preflop and then push in on the flop. But it is that freedom, that "space", if you will, in your chipstack to be able to make all the different moves a poker tournament player can make, that makes chip utility such a crucial tournament concept.

The most interesting thing about this concept to me, as I mentioned above, is that it leads to some very interesting conclusions about how one should play in tournaments. I mean, basically everyone knows that tight-aggressive is the way to play poker. It just is. Ask (or just watch) any good cash game player and you will see or hear it for yourself. You have to play tight, and you have to play aggressive. Most well-known tournament poker writers advocate this exact same TAGgy approach to playing in poker tournaments as well. And yet, argues Snyder in The Poker Tournament Formula II, the true best approach to playing in poker tournaments is actually far looser than it is tight. Aggressive, yes. Surely. But not tight. LAGgy is the way to go in poker tournaments, and that is all because of the concept of chip utility.

Now, I will be writing much more about this in the coming week(s) as I myself continue to read, reread and most of all to absorb all that Arnold Snyder is saying in this truly interesting and powerful tournament poker book. But let me ask you a question. How many of you have secretly sat and watched one of the red ftp pros play in a big mtt? Or better yet, tell me you haven't sat, either in secret or openly, on the rail while lucko or Chad have been on one of their incredible mtt streaks. I know I have had tons of railbirds basically for all of my final table runs over the past couple of years, as is the case with LJ and basically everyone else in our group who has final tabled with any regularity at all over the past several months. Think back over all those times you've sat and railed someone, especially early on in these tournaments, and you tell me: does lucko play tight poker early on in an mtt? Does Chad only ever raise or call with the top 5% of starting holdem hands? Is that how I play, be it in a blonkament or other large mtt? Of course not. Not even close.

Almost all of the successful large mtt players actually play this looser-aggressive style, especially early in tournaments. Although I suspect most of us -- certainly this includes me -- have never actually thought about things in terms of the concept of chip utility in any meaningful way, that's exactly what we're doing at its core. I can't count how many times I've chatted in the girly with one of these people about how I have no interest in sitting on a short stack early or really at any point in a tournament. Now, I know and watch tons of players -- admittedly most of them bloggers -- who are more than content to let their chip stack dwindle and dwindle all through the first couple hours of a tournament, just waiting for the one big hand to try to get a double up that, in the end, will only get them back to maybe 50% above their original starting stack even if they do manage to fully double with their monster starting hand. But that's not me. And it's not LJ, it's not lucko, it's not Chad, and frankly it's not Erick Lindgren or Daniel Negreanu or Doyle Brunson either. The bottom line is that, although cash poker often requires a tight, aggressive style of play, the concept of chip utility in poker tournaments typically means that it is well worth it for a skilled tournament player to play far looser early on, taking much more chance of busting out early in exchange for getting one's chip utility up near full utility early on, which really enables such a player to open up his or her arsenal of weapons. And that is how the best mtt players in the world approach the tournaments they play in, almost to a person.

As I mentioned, this is just scratching the surface of the ways that chip utility affects proper poker tournament strategy, and I will have much more to say about this topic in my posts over the next several days. But I'm telling you, if you're one of those people who has never had the success that so many other poker tournament players have, you don't understand why, and yet you also rely on things like tight-aggressive poker, the gap principle, regular pot odds (as opposed to "utility odds" -- more on that one coming later), etc. in your tournament play, then do yourself a favor and read The Poker Tournament Formula II. Read the first one actually, and then read the second. Read it, read it again, absorb it, and then live it at the poker tables. You will not believe how very off-base so many of the popular poker strategies can be when it comes to typical poker tournaments, and even moreso to online ones. With this book, an open mind and a willingness to challenge one's assumptions and to learn, there is no telling how your game can improve.