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Harrington's Zone System
Dan Harrington famously wrote Harrington
on Hold’em, Volume II: The Endgame. In this
book he introduced a novel method for dividing up
a poker tournament and adjusting the way you play
your personalized poker chip sets at different times
during the poker tournament. Essentially, he divides
a poker tournament into five ‘zones’ which
basically compares each poker player’s personalized
poker chip sets with the level of the blinds and antes
at that time. At each level or ‘zone’
of the poker tournament, he suggests a number of different
strategies to improve your poker gambling game to
make sure you increase rather than decrease the size
of your personalized poker chip sets. At every ‘zone’,
the correct Texas Holdem gambling and gaming strategy
varies considerably. Before we proceed to consider
these five zones in some depth, it is worth understanding
a key definition so that we can get the most out of
this valuable information and add more and more to
our personalized poker chip sets each time we play
Texas Holdem, whether at a home poker game or the
World Series of Poker or the World Poker Tour!
The Definition of ‘M’
No we have not gone mad and this is not a spelling
error! Read on to help ensure you have a huge personalized
poker chip set before entering the final stages of
a poker tournament. Dan Harrington uses the letter
‘M’ to represent a certain important value
which you need to learn how to calculate. ‘M’
represents the ratio of your personalized poker chips
compared to the blinds and antes at that particular
time in the poker gambling game. So if you had $250
worth in your personalized poker chip sets and the
blinds are $10/$15 (let us assume there are no antes),
your M is 10. Why? The total pot value before anyone
calls or raises is $25 and you have $250 in your personalized
poker chip sets and so you have 10 times more in your
personalized poker chip sets than the starting pot.
You will see ‘Action’ Dan Harrington referring
to this value ‘M’ frequently in the following
discussion and so it is important that you fully understand
where it has come from. Simply put, M is the ratio
of your personalized poker chip sets to the starting
poker pot. Read on to start to discover how you should
play the gambling game of Texas Holdem Poker at each
of the five zones…
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