[Jerrod Ankenman]

[ QUOTE ]
As for tournaments I am not sure how helpful TOP can be. In a cash game game having an edge, even a small one, will make you a consistant winner. But in a tournament you need to beat out 98% of the field to get paid. Since you need to win so many more times to make money, it would seem that a slight statistical advantage is not beneficial. To do well in tournaments it looks like you need to be a strong favorite every time you get your money in a pot. Drawing hands would therefore have greatly reduced value.

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One of the most misunderstood concepts about tournaments is this "need to be a strong favorite." It's true that you should occasionally sacrifice a small chip EV edge if you think you have an overlay on the field, but this concept has been distorted all out of proportion.

Consider the following: You're going to play a tournament. To win the tournament, you need to get to 2^7 or 128 of your starting stack. You have two choices: you can either flip a coin 7 times and if you win all of them you win. Otherwise, you can do the following: sacrifice 1/3 of your stack each time, but you get a 2-to-1 chance of winning your coin flip for your remaining stack. Now I would tend to think that the "wait for bigger edges" people would clealry prefer the second choice, because you have a much better chance of winning your favorable flips and getting more chances in the future to take the favorable flips.

The chance of hitting the first one is clearly 1/128. What's the chance of reaching 128 with the second?

It turns out that it's about 1/1000.

Now this isn't a robust model, but it's indicative of the problem with this kind of thinking.

Here's the thing. You're not going to cash in most of the tournaments you play. And you really suffer when you finish in the upper third of the tournament but out of the money, because of opportunity cost. Not to mention that there are cool fringe benefits of getting more chips early - that you can reasonably take all these coinflips against stacks half your size.

I consider myself to be a pretty good tournament player; quite a bit better than the field in just about every event I play. If someone offered me a QQ vs AK situation on the first hand of a tournament (remember this is 57-43), I would take it in a heartbeat. Sure, you'd love to get great spots all the time. But unless you've got the fix in, you just don't get enough of them often enough to win consistently.