Is Survival Itself A Good Sign?

[Magician]

If say 300 people start a tourney, and now it's down to 150 players, but my stack is number 120 and I'm at half the average (about 1,500, right where I started).

Is that good or bad?

Has the expected value of my buy-in increased or decreased?

Forget considerations of how you played to reach that point - faced simply with that information - would you take that deal?

[Greg (FossilMan)]

Until you get close to the money, or your stack gets very big, the value of each chip is linear. Thus, if you started with T1500 and still have that number when half the field is gone, your EV has not changed much from when you started.

As for whether any of this is a good sign, it's not really useful at judging your EV. Simple super-tight play will alone get you to the last half of most tournaments all by itself. However, super-tight play is not +EV in tournaments, so simply always lasting to at least the second half of the events you play is not in itself a sign that you are above average compared to the fields.

Later, Greg Raymer (FossilMan)