How's Your Dan?
Over at the secondary feature table, Gavin Smith and Dan Harrington were just having a conversation about "M" -- that indicator of how many rounds (blinds plus antes) a player has left in his stack made famous by Harrington in his influential Harrington on Hold'em books.
"Why'd you call it 'M'?" asked Smith. "Why not 'H'?" Their end of the table laughed. "Even better, why didn't you call it your 'Dan'? You could say 'My "Dan" is 8.5��'?"
Harrington proceeded to relate the story -- told in HOH -- about how he and Paul Magriel had had dinner one night before the original book was published. Magriel had explained to Harrington how mathematicians generally assign a letter to a formula, and since Magriel had also come up with the idea of talking about the ratio of one's chips to the number of orbits one could afford, Harrington decided to call it "M".
Smith and Harrington were soon involved in a pot in which Smith raised his button and Harrington called from the big blind. The flop came 
, Harrington bet, and Smith let his hand go.
Harrington has moved up to 220,000 now. Meanwhile, Smith lost a few more chips on the following hand, and has slipped down to 80,000. That's a "Dan" of about 10 at the moment.