[Dave D]

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So, mostly this question is for middle or late stages in relation to stack sizes, but i suppose it could apply to early stages as well.

anyways, with N players left (say 5-25% of the starting field), later in the tourney, with blinds large, but not stupidly large such that the average stack is red zone, how often can a good (say 100% ROI) player win when they have an average stack? also, with N players, how big of a stack does a very good player need in order to win 1/N times?

i know of course it will depend a lot on how many players are left, as a very good HU player probably can't win much more than 60% when the stacks are equal and the blinds are fairly large. so thats only 120% of if he won only his share. but say there's 50 players left out of 500. a very good player with an average stack will certainly win more than 1/50 * 120% = 1/42. there must be some equation that takes into account players left that will give a solution to how often you win. does anybody know of such an equation that will at least approximate this?

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OP referanced this thread in another thread, so I'll bump/respond to it cuz I think it's interesting.

I'm pretty sure OP means "win" as in place first , assuming a standard payout structure right?

I don't think there's any real clear answer to this question. I think a lot has to do with the player's individual style, ie some people are better at playing a small stack, others' chances go up basically exponentially as their stack is bigger. I realize that everyone would do better with a bigger stack obviously, but what I mean is some players have *more* of a chance than others with a bigger stack. This is distinct from some players are better than others because I'm trying to make the subtle distinction that some players rely more on the post flop game which they need a bigger stack for.

This is where this question relates to the other one Ed Miller posted. I think there are two things that are crucial to trying to answer this question:

1. What's the rest of the field like. Your expectation changes a lot depending on the type of tourney. You can be a lot more confident in a party 10+1 than a 100+9. You know there will be a good number of weak players towards this stage of a 10+1 than a 100+9. As such, stack size becomes more important as you go up in buy in.

2. How fast are blinds going up? What is the payout structure? Basically I think we all know that a slower structure favors better players. We know therefore that these factors are crucial in determining your chances of winning. Payout structure is relativly minor, but also affects the way other people play. Namely, if it's really steep you know that you're playing for first, but others might be trying to stall so you can take advantage of that.


Overall though, I'd say that if you have the avg, you're going to win way less than 1/N times (I know you said greater than avg, but I'm stating this as a baseline). I think you're going to need at least 3x the avg to even come close to making any sort of expectation as to your chances of winning. Less than that, and for me it's a toss up.

Maybe I'm just jaded, but the bottom line is that in order to win, you're going to still need to win several more coinflips. So you need a lot of chips to simply survive luck. I would view this situation as having so many variables that it's basically useless to try to figure it out. You don't know the skill level at your table, your table compared to the rest of the tourney, and all kinds of other variables. I think all these unknown variables makes it impossible to ever come up with an equation, so I just wouldn't worry about it.