[eastbay]

I seem to be a little more circumspect about this than most.

Certainly there are situations where limping is just wrong. But it may not be as wrong in as many situations as many may think. I'm just not sure.

Just because we all know that a pushing style can win a lot of money, that doesn't preclude the possibility that a style that involves more limping can't also be a winning strategy if properly constructed and executed. I suspect that a more limp-y style may be more fundamentally exploitable and therefore may only be effective against certain kinds of opponents, but that's just general speculation.

One thing I can say with some confidence is that we know a lot more about the pushing style because it is more amenable to a theoretical analysis. It is inherently less complex than a limping style that involves a lot of postflop decisions. So we can have more confidence about our understanding of the pushing style, than we can about a limping style, just based on math-y sorts of reasoning.

Bottom line: IMO, there is a lot of unexplored territory in SnG play (on a theoretical level), and I'm not one to jump to conclusions about what other styles other than push/fold might also be profitable. I don't have any simulation data or analysis to provide at the moment.

As for my personal advocacy, I like a mostly push/fold style because I like the fact that you can gain confidence in your decisions based on the relatively tractable analysis you can do within that style. As a default, it's definitely the place to start, IMO.

I think the next few years are going to show some dramatic improvements in the theoretical understanding of no-limit and tournament no-limit poker as this problem starts to get increasing attention in the academic and mathematically sophisticated entrepreneurial worlds. We may be in for some surprises about what kinds of strong strategies exist; time will tell.

eastbay