[justT]

Sorry if I came off as a naysayer, trying to disprove something is my way of seeing if it has value or not, often comes off as naysaying. I've been thinking about some things that are related to your quest and wanted to toss a few things at you.

Tournament structure and what it means wrt optimal play: General consensus is almost straight out of HOH2, use M, Q doesn't tell you very much. The problem I have with that is M is reactive to the structure (i.e. when you get to this zone, you should do xyz), not proactive to the structure. Try playing a rebuy tourney like a freeze-out, don't rebuy, don't add-on. You very quickly get to the point where your M is okay, but your Q is killing you.

A while back I plotted the chip count for about 10 tourney's where the player went deep in the tourney, most were first place finishes. A couple of the tourney were mine, I was rather dismayed when I compared mine to those of better players. Mine were ugly, my chip count showed a lot of large gains and losses (lots of big hands), theirs tended to be more constant accumulation, picking up a lot of small pots here and there. The other thing I noticed, was that they very rarely "flat lined", very rarely did their accumulation stopped for a period longer than 20-30 hands.

Blinds definitely definitely add an exponential nature to the need for chip accumulation. I plotted the data from Burningyen's structure thread on a log chart, and all of them were straight lines (within reason). When you get around to calculating $EV, payout structure will probably also prove to be exponential in nature.

Anyhow, best of luck in your quest, I'm interested in seeing where you take it. Let me know if I can help.