Wynn Tournament and 5/10NL

My sleeping schedule is now such that I am awake at noon and can play in the acclaimed Wynn tournament. The tournament is $330, and you start out with an M of 40. M, named after backgammon and poker theorist Paul Magriel, is the ratio of the size of your stack to the size of the pot before the flop. A higher M generally means that more skill is involved. A lower M implies a lot of all-in bets, eliminating most post-flop skill. Thus, most good players prefer tournaments where you have a high M for most of the tournament. This happens when the stacks start out big and the blinds move up slowly - at the Wynn they move up every 45 minutes. For comparison, the Mirage tournaments on Tuesday and Wednesday start with an M of 15 an the blinds move up every 30 minutes.

Anyway, I played in the Wynn tournament for the first time yesterday. It attracted 88 players, for a pretty substantial prize pool. Unfortunately, a high percentage of the players were pretty good, due probably to the structure attracting better players. I was doing well until I got a little too excited with 55 in the big blind and reraised what I percieved to be a steal from the button, and ran into QQ. This took out half my stack, and I couldn't get anything going after that.

Later, I went to play the 5-10 NL game. This game is entirely beatable, although I failed to beat it yesterday. The game was looser than the average 2-5 NL game, which is saying something. I hope yesterday was representative of what can be expected at that level. If so, I'll be playing there more often in the coming months. For now, I'll be playing a mix of that and 2-5 NL.