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Tournament Strategy: The Zone System, Implementation of the M-Concept

You will find it difficult to understand this article without having read and understood the M-Concept Article.

The Zone System can be used mainly for Multitable Tournament Strategy, but also to a certain extent it is a valuable concept for Sit & Go Tournaments. For Limit Hold'em Tournaments or Cash Games this Concept does not have any relevance at all!
In each Hand of a Poker Tournament you can calculate your 'M'. Depending on your 'M', you are classified in different Zones. The Strategies you should use in each Zone are described in great detail in Harrington on Hold’em, Volume 2.

The Green Zone

Your M is over 20. You may play as you wish as all options that suit your style are open to you. You can look at many flops if that suits your style, you may play a tight or passive style, as you wish. With an M over 20 you can also Reraise preflop, without putting your Tournament on the Line. Concentrate on playing your successful Tournament Style and make sure, your M does not drop under 20. It is worth taking some risks, to stay in the Green Zone.

The Yellow Zone

Your M is between 10 and 20. When you are in this Zone, you should not keep on playing a conservative, tight game. You should slightly lower your Starting Hand Requirements. Small Pocket Pairs often are not profitably playable (read more about this at the end of this article).

The Orange Zone

Your M is between 6 and 10. In this Zone you simply do not have a large enough stack to make complex moves or set funky traps. Because your Stack is too small to see many flops, you have to play much more aggressively as you should in the Yellow Zone. Often enough you will be compelled already preflop to risk all your remaining chips. (A raise to 3 times the Big Blind often already commits over 25% of your Stack. With a Small Pocket Pair you have two options: Fold or go All-In preflop! Do Not Limp into Pots with Small Pocket Pairs in the Orange Zone!

The Red Zone

Your M now is between 1 and 5. In the Red Zone, you have exactly two preflop options: 1) Fold 2) All-In!
Any other play just does not make sense. Your goal is to move out of the Red Zone as soon as possible. If you find yourself in middle Position and all players before you have folded, mediocre hands like J8 or 87s are good enough to push All-In! If you 'only' manage to steal the Blinds with your All-In move, your M has increased by 1 point! If you are called you will have decent chances of doubling up, unless you are up against a Big Pocket Pair. In this Zone, you simply do not have the time to wait for AA, KK or QQ. Has your M dropped under 3, then you have to be aware that the Big Blind should correctly call your All-In with any two hole cards. One of the biggest mistakes in Tournament Poker is too passive play in the Red Zone! You never should let yourself be blinded down to the Dead Zone without putting up a fight! Too often one sees exactly this behavior online... and yes, sometimes you will be laughed at by people who have never heard of the Zone System. Quote 'What a donk, he went All-In with J8 off suit, haha!'

The Dead Zone
Your M is under 1! Try to go All-In as soon as possible and hope for a miracle! When playing Tournament Poker well, the only Situation you should find yourself in the Dead Zone is, when you just lost an All-In Situation against a player who just had slightly less Chips than you did. If you let yourself be Blinded Down into the Dead Zone, you played too passively!

Pocket Pairs in the Yellow Zone.
In this short section we do not want to look at each aspect of the j System, but the following advice is important. Small Pocket Pairs are a great thing at the beginning of a Tournament. After a limper or a small raise you call with the Pocket Pair. In 11.8 % of the cases you will hit the Jackpot by Flopping a Set or better with it. If your opponent also hits the Flop (for instance he has AK and the flop is K95, hitting your Pocket Pair of Fives), then you can expect to be paid off nicely. If you miss the Flop, you will not invest any more money into the Pot. To make this situation profitable in the long run, the following conditions have to apply:
1. More than just one opponent sees the flop. The more opponents you have, the better the Chance of someone else hitting something and thereby paying you off
2. After you no one should raise, or you have to fold your hand, investment lost!
3. You have to hit the Set or better (in 11.8 % of the cases)
4. You have to meet resistance after hitting the Flop, if everyone Folds to your raise, you do not win a big pot.
5. You have to win the hand, too (sometimes you might lose all your chips to a Straight, Flush, higher Set etc.)

Harrington calculates in his Book that you need an M of approximately 24, to limp preflop profitably with Small Pocket Pairs. And be aware that your opponents also need roughly the same amount of Chips as you have, or you will not be winning enough chips from them either. If you find yourself on the Button with 44 and behind you two players are sitting with an M of 6, it is not worth limping into the pot. In this case you should Raise or Fold (depending on the exact situation), but never only limp into the pot!

In our Poker-Tool-Section (coming soon), you can find an Excel-Sheet to help calculate your M-Value during a tournament.

M-Concept in Cash Games?

The M-Concept is a Tournament Strategy Concept, but nevertheless we would like to give some advice to No Limit Cashgames, too! Make sure you always have an M over 25 when you are playing a Cash Game!
If your M is under that value, some of the (maybe strategically perfectly fine) moves you might be making just will not be profitable! Over and over again I see players who sit at a 0.50 $ / 0.50 $ Pot Limit Hold'em table with 8$. As mentioned earlier, they limp with small pocket pairs and just do not get paid off well enough for that play to be profitable. Also, these are exactly the players who on the Turn Card can not raise enough anymore to give their opponents a hard time chasing their draws. Interestingly, these are then the players who think they are so unlucky because their opponents always draw out on them... If you see an Opponent with a too small Stack in a Cash Game, this is equivalent to a big sign above his head saying 'FISH'. When choosing my Cash Game table, I plough through all of the tables in the Limit I want to play and make sure there are a couple of shortstacked players (FISH) sitting there. The Choice of your seat and table should not be pure coincidence in a Cashgame...

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