[pooh74]

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I think I am still being unclear. What I am really driving at is this:

We all seem to agree that taking a coinflip for your survival is a bad idea in a SNG and we try to avoid those sorts of confrontations. What about when you have a really big stack and it's not about your survival? Can you start to make more gambling kinds of plays if your stack is huge and you have the opportunity to bust a player?

Now, though I mentioned it in my original post, I don't buy the argument that we can do this because shorty's chips have 'extra' value. As we add them to our stack, they don't have that value anymore so that can't exactly be the reason why we would justify these kinds of plays.

Still, many tournament experts seem to advocate taking chances against small stacks where you have the opportunity to bust them.

Is our avoidance of confrontation a universal theme of good tournament play, or can we take advantage of small stacks by getting them all-in we have a huge stack. Even if we are only 50/50 or worse?

ICM says no

I guess my reason for this thread is just that when I was thinking about this myself, I suspected it would say no, but that wasn't my gut feeling about what was right. Now that may simply be because in reality the blinds will give us the proper edge we need.

Still, might it be something more than this.

While I don't like to deal in vague imprecise statements, I am reminded of a gigabet (I think) statement where he considers the extra chips in a big stack (when chipleader) somewhat useless, as he cannot double those chips on a single hand. Does this, or something like this change our opinion about putting those chips into play on even money confrontations, or even confrontations where we might be a slight underdog?

Regards
Brad S

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Thats funny, because my gut instinct always said "yes", it is a bad idea. The inherent advantage of calling a short stack's all-in is usually in the fact that their range will be much wider. But I dont see why taking 50/50s (putting aside that we never "know" for sure we have a flip) is commonly regarded as a good thing.

I think the value of having a short stack present is mainly to be able to exploit the medium stack(s). This, to me, is much more valuable than knocking out a player. I would rather use those so called extra chips exploiting someone who still has hopes of making the money ( or higher payout) than knocking out someone on a flip and then having much LESS leverage against those medium stacks. ICM will not take this into account but these concepts are huge IMO.