Most players don't seem to care too much when the antes are introduced in a poker tournament. It's hard not to blame them because antes start at such a low level - usually 25 chips per player. Even if you are orange mzone at the time they start, 25 chips is still a little hard to notice from your stack. Not only that, you are already in the money and this effects a lot of players' attitudes in regards to how loosely they are willing to play.
When you take a closer look however, antes change the dynamics of a poker tournament to larger degree than most players realize. This is because a lot of experienced players use M as a way to determine what strategy they should be using at any given stage of the tournament. Once the antes kick in, M becomes much more important because antes are factored into determining what a player's M is.
Let's take for example, that you have 9,000 in chips and the blinds are 150 and 300. Well you are in a rather comfortable green mzone situation because your M is exactly 20. Conversely, let's say that in that same structure there is now 25 in antes. When you factor this in, all of a sudden you're M is now only slightly higher than 13.
So it's easy to think about 25 chips as not really effecting your stack, and that is mostly true, but the average pot at your table (assuming nine players at the table) is significantly higher because of all of the antes together make the pot more desirable, especially for shorter stacks.
You see a lot of players don't understand that in calculating M, you are actually taking into account the minimum pot size and comparing it to the size of your stack. For shorter stacks, this may very well mean making some bold plays, and for bigger stacks, stealing blinds becomes much more lucrative.
So keep in mind that when the antes start, however small they are, you're actually entering into a very new and aggressive stage of the poker tournament [http://mzonereport.com/index.php/Online-MTT-Strategy/the-five-stages-of-a-poker-tournament.html] and you need to be mindful of this when deciding to challenge for a pot.
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