Adjusting for the Ante

Adjusting for the Ante in Tournaments

One thing that consistently baffles me is otherwise very good MTTers that do not accurately adjust for the ante. Adjusting is crucial, especially late in an MTT when the antes are huge and the effective stack is often much shorter in actuality than players realize, which is a point I often make in my videos for Drag The Bar.

There are many ways to adjust, which all have their pros and cons. Here are a few:

1.) Intuitive adjustment. This is usually what a player is using when he says “I had 12 big blinds, but it was with the ante.” The problem with this method is accuracy, because it does not take into account how large the ante is. (As the common statement made by the hypothetical player above would still be true if the ante was tiny or if it were large.)

2.) Harrington’s M. In this popular method, you divide your stack by the total of blinds plus antes. While the “zones” of green for an M over 50 for example are a nice way to indicate how many speculative hands you should play, the pitfall of Harrington’s M is that it assumes a full table, which is often not the case late in a tournament. There is a way to further adjust to an effective M for playing short-handed, but that calculation is way more steps than are necessary to adjust for the ante.

3.) Adding the big blind and the small blind together and treating that total as the big blind. While this method is very easy to calculate, it varies wildly in terms of accuracy.

4.) Multiplying the starting pot by .66. This is my preferred method for many reasons. First of all it is accurate regardless of how many players are left at the table, and even if there is a dead small blind. Also, it is simple to calculate and easy to estimate whether playing live or online. (The reason it is .66 is that the big blind is usually 2/3 the starting pot.)

Poker is a game of limited information, so we need all the info we can possibly have—preferably as quickly as we can get it. That is why I think it is so important to take the time to accurately adjust for the ante.

Closely related to this thread...

Adjusted Big Blind

Harrington does adjust to shorter tables and ante's with his Effective M.

The way I calculate it I don't have to do anything fancy. I can not remember ever thinking I had 12.835 M. 12 or 13 will do fine. Even tho the dif in that case is 8% (ish), I don't think the 8% applied to that decision to shove is significant.

I check the pot size before betting starts but after blinds and ante's are posted, and figure out how many times my stack goes into that number.

I don't have to do any fancy addition of the antes, because all ONLINE sites show the pot size at all times.

When there are ante's, my contribution per orbit is the same as the number of players remaining at that table. Tables change as well, and all I have to do is when the table changes, I re-evaluate my effective M.

Sounds way more complicated than it is. However, the same info is available via ABB, and the .67 thing (2/3 thing is easier mentally). But apparently the result of the 2/3 pot is used to calculate something else.....What is that something else?

That was my question too. I think maybe Jenny/Katie forgot to wrap up her post.

Sorry if this was unclear-- I just meant that it equals the ante-adjusted BB.

And I assume you suggest that the point of knowing that information would be for bet sizing ? Or perhaps for judging when to adjust one`s hand selection ?

CCs readership includes a lot of beginners. It`s not necessarily safe to assume that the readers will grasp advanced concepts unless they are spelled out.

It is important to know for all the reasons that knowing the true effective stack size is important. To name a couple-- when to play shove/fold, when you are deep enough to set-mine, and so on.

IN pokerstars SNG i do it intuitively. Also at blinds like 4-800 we're usually 3 handed or HU so the ante doesn't have a huge impact.

When i play MTT, i use pretty much the same rule you do, i work out the pot size and work out 2/3 of the pot to get a rough estimate of the blind level.

It's basically the same as M, but i feel that using the "ABB" is probably better, as i feel players get carried away with the "M Zone" or misuse it based on game type (For 9 man SNGs for example, using the same M Zone is pretty bad). I could be wrong here but it's just something i've noticed/personal opinion. Either way it's two differant ways of doing the same thing.

I like adjusted-BB (I've always called it effective bb's, but I guess that can be misleading), it feels way more intuitive to me. I basically always know what to do with 10bb's - I don't always know what to do with 8 M, however.

* .66 won the poll!

Thanks for sharing your valuable insights, dj11, Egon Towst, WiZZiM, & cjatud2012 !

Although I don't mind the .66, I am more on the intuitive side. I think the one thing we all generally agree on is that our preflop raising ranges open up significantly late in tournaments when the blinds and antes are big, and especially when we are 5, 6,7 handed. I think the three most important things you NEED to consider when deciding whether to raise late in a tournament are: 1) your chip stack. I won't be raising marginal hands when I have between 15 and 25 BB's, because I am looking to conserve those chips and get them all in preflop with the best hand. Making a marginal raise and having to muck preflop only to lose a few BB's will get you nowhere fast. 2) Your position. I am much more likely to raise A5s in the cutoff in a 7 handed game than I am UTG. Again, your chip stack should help you decide whether to raise a hand like this UTG. 3) The table dynamic. Have people been generally passive? If so, we can assume that opening our PFR range will boost our chip stack. If ppl are generally good and know what they are doing, I would stay away from raising wide UTG and in early position with marginal holdings. Also, don't feel like you need to raise in late position with marginal holdings every time. I am an MTT reg and I can say that folding marginal hands in position late in tournys has done me very well. I am very aggro but I won't raise every marginal holding I get in position late in a tourny.