Two Plus Two Older Archives - How are people this retarted?

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Are you playing for 1st or to just survive?

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This is not a rhetorical question as you may suppose, but rather an extremely misguided one. You should never "play for first." You should play to maximize your $$ expectation.

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I agree with the logic but disagree with the conclusion. Here's my reasoning:

Given Pushy McPush's pushing strategy, my AQo is likely to be quite dominant. Against a random hand, AQo wins about 2:1, and you probably looked like you were playing completely random hands. That means that two-thirds of the time I'm going to have the huge, dominant chip stack.

If I fold, the stacks will be:

4035
140
2190 <-- me
1635

ICM gives me about $15.51 for this.

If I gamble, I lose 1/3 of the time, but 2/3 of the time the stacks are:

1245
140
4980 <-- me
1635

And ICM gives me $20.71 for this. Expected payout is therefore (2/3) * 20.71 = $13.81, and the call costs me an apparent $1.70 or so.

However, this ignores the fact that if I do win, I'll shut down the thief who has been MERCILESSLY stealing my blinds. If the thief is smart (and he appears to be), then he WON'T steal the tiny stack, giving him another round or two to steal with impunity. How long can I bleed t450 every four hands and still stay in this tournament? Basically, if I win this one hand, I'm the favorite to win the whole tournament. If I lose it, I'm out of the money. If I don't play it, I'm in a horse-race for second.

Frankly, I think metagame considerations may make this a reasonable call unless you're confident the short stack won't survive this orbit. Do I think a 5+1 player was thinking about metagame issues? No. I think he was just pissed that you kept jerking off into his breakfast cereal and decided to do something about it.