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Trying to maximise your dollar winnings is wrong since utility per dollar usually decreases the more you win.


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Umm no? Just because the utility decreases and/or has decreasing marginal returns, doesn't mean it's useless? It's not negative to have more money, you're still getting more "good", so that doesn't mean you should try to get less of it just because every dollar is worth less. Only when the marginal return is 0 is it not worth getting more.


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Dollar-EV and Utility-EV will often guide you to the same decisions. I'm trying to say that if they conflict you should pick utility-EV.

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Incidently, I'd make the opposite argument. A dollar is really worth very little to me, I'd never play a tournament where the prize for 1st is a dollar, it just wouldn't be worth my time. If first is 10k however, that's worth my time. So I'd argue more money has increasing value, ie the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.


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You should maximise utility/hour of course.

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So if the money is life-changing, you should probably try to limit your variance a bit and not push small edges. The trouble is that you'll then be at a disadvantage against the people at the table to who the money isn't life-changing.

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This is why you're not supposed to play outside your BR. But OP isn't really talking about a variance situation. He's talking about winning say 100k, when you have a BR of 5k, ie a HUGE payday. Variance would only matter if he was talking about a normal tournament inside his BR. Presumably the competition in this tournament is better than OP, b/c its outside his BR (there's fish at every level, but everyone knows the competition is harder at the 200+15 level than the 5r level), so he SHOULD be pushing small edges to make up for the skill differential. Ie if I know I'm in a coinflip situation to win a tourney against Doyle, I'll take it every time. there's no way he would want to though b/c he knows he can beat me with skill over time.

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As long as you're maximising your utility you shouldn't care that you're up against someone who's trying to maximise his utility from different criteria even when it leads to less (or - theoretically - more) dollars for you. So I should probably drop the 'trouble' part from my original posting. It's only a disadvantage dollar-wise. Not utility-wise. And utility is what matters.