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Old 10-26-2004, 04:35 PM
fnurt fnurt is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 292
Default Re: Hypothetical situation

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You are willing to take that risk for 10k chips in the first hour of play in a 5 day tourney? Am i just insane?

Maybe its just cause my BR is 1/4 of the buyin for that tourney.....

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See, that's the thing. If the money you spend to enter a tournament means so much to you that it's going to lead you to make sub-optimal decisions, you shouldn't be playing. You're going to make bad laydowns. You're going to play scared on the bubble because you "want to make your money back." The better approach is to forget about the entry fee as soon as you pay it. That money is gone. From here your goal is simply to maximize your win.

This call is an absolute no-brainer. A 65/35 edge is way too much for even the best player in the WSOP to pass up. If we were talking about your home game involving your crazy cousins who say "puppy-feet" instead of clubs, the answer might be different. The WSOP field is a bit tougher than that.

Variations on this question come up A LOT and the discussion is always instructive... instructive, that is, regarding the number of bad assumptions people make about poker. In one such thread I asked "if you pass on this hand, and just play solid poker with small pots, what is your chance to double up before you go bust?" Some people thought a top tournament pro would have a NINETY PERCENT chance to double up before they bust, using a conservative strategy. The only response I can offer to this crazy assumption is that no top tournament pro would agree.

Sklansky does talk about passing up a small edge if you are one of the best players in the field. None of us would be among the best players in the WSOP. More importantly, 65/35 is NOT A SMALL EDGE.

I do not want to hear one person respond by saying "but if you lose you're out." Resist the temptation!
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