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A few years ago the Backgammon expert and ex-world champion Paul Magriel came up with the notion of “M” which basically tells you how many rounds of the table you can survive before you go broke. The “M” factor is now used by many leading tournament players both in online poker tournaments and live. The essence of “M” lets you know how long you can survive with blinds and antes without playing a hand before you go bust. So let us say that the blinds are 100-200 with an ante of 25 and eight players present. This means that your total cost for one round of play is 500.

So if you have a stack of 5000 then you simply take 5000 and divide by 500 which equals 10 and so the figure of 10 is your “M” total and means that you can last for ten rounds at this current rate. So what exactly does this figure mean and what has it to do with tournament poker? Well without going too deeply into what is a very in depth subject then we can quickly look at what your overall strategy should be when your “M” is at certain levels.

Firstly it is commonly accepted now that you shouldn’t let your “M” drop below 3 and anything that is between 8 and 3 or 4 is a short stack. It has always been my inclination that you should avoid at all costs getting to a stage where you are short or even approaching a short stack. This is because once you are short then you have a lot of trouble building your stack again. You have less fold equity and there is no fear factor with your plays and the bigger stacks will look you up. But you need to remember that the lower you let your stack get then the bigger the gap is between your stack and the other stacks on your table.

This increases the chances that they will look you up when you move all in. If you look at this in a very simplistic way and both you and your opponent have 5000 in chips! Every 100 in chips swings that balance to your opponent and removing just 100 makes those stacks 4900-5100! If the stack sizes became 3000-7000 then your opponent would have more than a 2/1 chip lead. However your opponent would be reticent about jeopardising his position because one double up shifts things around hugely and makes the chip stacks 6000-4000 in your favour.

When the situation reaches 2000-8000 then you are starting to reach a critical stage and when it reaches 1000-9000 then you will be called far more often and with a much wider range as a loss would be a relatively small percentage of your opponents stack. This is essentially what happens but on a larger scale in poker tournaments and is why you cannot allow your stack to reach a stage where in order to survive you have to be dealt good starting cards. In tournament poker then you rarely have the time to make good hands and you need to steal your way to the money seats and the final table quite often.