Whatever happened to Arnold Snyder?
Somebody asked on the forum if anybody had read "The Poker Tournament Formula" by Arnold Snyder. Of course BaddBeatBobb and myself participated in Arnold's forum and were initially excited about how he was playing live tournaments. We really wanted to know if the strategy could be translated to low limit online poker and after several attempts to get data, we surmised it would not be successful. Arnold himself came back and basically said that he had no experience online with this system so couldn't verify it as a winning strategy online.
I would have really liked to devise an aggressive strategy for Full Tilt tournaments, but in trying so, it was more like smashing your forehead against a brick wall.
Here is BBB's response:
Ahh, Poker Tournament Formula, one of my favorite and enduring hobby-horses.
I really like the book, and think it emphasizes a few important ideas.
If you find it startling and new, as I did when i first read it, then
it may be the case for you, as it *certainly* was for me, that I simply
hadn't played enough tournaments, nor thought about tournament strategy
in enough depth to put Arnold's ideas into a bigger context.
The book is a bit like handing matches and gasoline to eight year
old boys. They'll have great fun right up to the point where they set
their own clothes on fire.
In a nutshell, the strategy is to break into unopened pots from
position (hijack, cutoff, button) to try and steal. If you don't get
the steal, then fire off a c-bet on the flop. If that doesn't get it
done, jam the turn and pray.
Ok, obviously I'm being far too simplistic here. Arnold's a very
good writer, and the book explores a great many lines of play,
introduces the theoretical notion of speed of a tournament (rate of
change of M, or the first derivative of M, dM/dt if you prefer a more
formal expression), and it emphasizes that you have to stop being a
timid weenie and start betting.
The main problem is, for all its elegance, it simply lacks
empirical data of success. No one has actually come out and put their
poker winnings record up for public scrutiny and said, "I did this all
with the Snyder method." Marty, by contrast, has been very open about
his own record (see tournament results) and the method he used
to achieve the win-rate: mousie, patient, TAG.
Marty in fact asked right on Snyder's own forum for anybody to actually
share some numbers and he attempted to collaborate with Arnold to adapt
the PTF to small buyin tournaments where players are far too sticky to
let anybody get away with a position-based steal strategy.
As for me, I attempted to formalize the mathematics in the PTF, to
precisely describe dM/dt, and I discovered that the formulae break down
in field sizes above about 300 players, when you need to shift from
Arnold's (basically) quadratic equations to exponential equations. I'm
referring specifically to his field factor equation. I asked about this
on his forum and got no useful replies. So, since his strategy relies
explicitly on tournament speed, which relies implicitly on field
factor, and since many online tournaments have fields larger than 300,
there's a pretty big problem here. The problem, to my knowledge,
remains unacknowledged and hence un-addressed to this day.
Formalisms aside, the more basic issue is "Put up or shut up," and
nobody has yet been willing to display their tournament success record
while claiming it is based on a fundamentally PTF-based strategy.
