BBs, M, and Three-Bets

When I was about 10 years old, BBs were little metal pellets that you put into an air gun. We all wanted one, but when I finally got my gun, I got bored after a week of shooting cardboard boxes in the basement. By the time I was a teenager, BB was Brigitte Bardot, the hottest actress in films. I wanted one of her, too. (It probably would have taken longer than a week of playing with her in the basement for me to get bored.) Now I’m mature, and I realize that BBs are big blinds. One often hears tournament situations described with the number of big blinds that a player has.

Using the number of big blinds that you or your opponents have as a guide to strategy is simple. It is pretty easy to figure out that if a big blind is 200 and someone has 2,000 in chips, he has 10 BBs. In general, this works perfectly in cash games. In tournaments, however, there are often antes. The addition of an ante changes the calculations. Now, your cost per round, CPR, is both the blinds and eight or nine antes. If stack size is divided by CPR, you get a smaller number than simply using BBs. Dan Harrington, Paul Magriel, and others started to refer to this number as M.

Here is a simple example: The blinds are 100-200 and the ante is 25 at an eight-handed table. Your CPR is 500. If you fold every hand for one orbit, you lose 500. If your stack is 2,000, your M is 2,000 divided by 500, or 4. Note that even though you have 10 BBs, your M is only 4, and it is time to get very aggressive. The ante also changes the odds that you are getting when you raise or call. If the blinds were 100-200 with no ante, and someone raised to 2.5 BBs, or 500, it would cost you 500 to call if you weren’t in one of the blinds. There would be 800 in the pot, and you would be getting 8-5 on a call. If there were antes, however, there would be 1,000 in the pot and you would get 2-1 on your call.

M is really a much more efficient measure to use in tournaments, but it is also harder to calculate and more cumbersome to use. If you are good at making quick arithmetic judgments, stick with M. If not, use BBs. It is easier to do the arithmetic. Just make a mental correction for the fact that there are antes. Remember that it is fine to raise a little more or call a little looser once the antes have kicked in.

Both M and BBs are useful measures. When choosing which to use, pick M for accuracy and BBs for simplicity.

I was having lunch with Dennis Waterman recently, and we got into a discussion of the term three-bet. Three-bet has become the popular way to refer to a reraise. In limit poker, it makes sense to talk about three-betting, since all bets are the same size. In no-limit poker, it makes absolutely no sense to talk about three-betting as if all bets were created equal. Suppose that you are in the early rounds of a tournament with blinds of 100-200. You raise to 600. The button three-bets. Does that mean anything? Yes, you know that he has reraised, but how much? Maybe he made it 1,000, or maybe he shoved for 8,000. Both are three-bets. I prefer to think of it as a raise to 600 and a reraise to 1,200, but in no-limit, I focus on the amounts. My advice is to get away from thinking of anything except the amounts. While poker requires good psychological skills, it also requires an awareness of mathematics and probabilities. If you get out of the habit of thinking that someone three-bet and start thinking in terms of the amount bet and how it compares to pot size and stack size, you will take a huge step forward.

Steve “Zee” Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. He can be found at many major tournaments and playing on Full Tilt, as one of its pros. He usually spends much of the fall hanging out in his bars on Avenue A — Nice Guy Eddie’s and The Library near Houston, and Doc Holliday’s at 9th Street — in New York City.