[beeyjay]

Its interesting I open this forum and see this as I was thinking about making a similarly minded post myself. In addition to your math argument is one more based in reasoning:

Say your playing for first strategy works well and you have a large stack when the 4th person is eliminated. You're now 3 handed with blinds probably at a level where a 1000 stack is almost pushing any A and a lot of Ks and quite possibly even more. Say you have 3000-4000 chips. The player on the button (who just tried to fold into the money) has 1000 chips and blinds are 300/600. He pushes with Ax and you call with KQ. No help comes and all of a sudden hes at 2900 and you're at 2000. Yet he didn't take nearly the risk you did of not making any money at all.

All I'm saying is that on the bubble gambling for 1st doesn't make much sense to me as when you are in the money the blinds are so high, really anything can and will happen. Having a (relatively) large stack when you're there really only gives you so much of an edge. So much of it really comes down to luck at that point. I feel like you have much more control over whether you make it in the money or not.