Problems With Effective M

[Bastoche]

I'm having a problem understanding Effective M in short table situations. I'll give an example to illustrate.

Live 6-handed multi-table tournament.

Typical players of this weekly tournament: Loose-passive.
(They all tend to be afraid of normal raises which, to them, look like big bets. For the most part, they are hesitant to put all their chips in the pot before the river. At the same time, however, they don't understand how anybody can evaluate their hand based on just two cards preflop, and they are often upset that they don't get to play cheaply. If they call a raise, their cards have to look "pretty" to them. From my observations, "pretty" means 2 face cards, big pairs, or any Ace. They think medium to small pairs are garbage. If the players make it to the flop, you can count on them to stick around to river most of the time, regardless of bet sizes.)

The situation:

Hero: T2700
You are the short-stack, but the other stacks only range from T3000-T5000.

100-200 Level 5-Handed

Top 16 Pay; 35 Players Remain

Hero: A[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img]8[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] UTG

M = 9
Effective M = 4.5

Do I push all-in?

I'm in the red-zone based on the effective M, but the blinds suggest that an all-in of 2700 is a very large raise.

Or do I employ a different strategy based on some other instruction I am not taking into account?

[bobman0330]

Firstly, ignore M and all other aspects of tournament strategy and focus on trashing these people by stealing all their blinds.

Secondly, I think effective M is probably best for deciding whether you should play the hand, not necessarily how to play it.