Low limit strategy vs. tactics

[KuQuAT]

This isn't a bad beat story, though it may sound like one. Oh, and warning: ass-backward thinking ahead...

In several recent low limit tournaments, I've been hunted down like a stuck pig by inferior hands (either massively or minorly inferior). This is, of course, the nature of low-limit games. It happens to all of us.

For example, holding J7o in the BB, one limper, SB completes, I check. Flop comes:
KJ7r
For better or worse, I feel like I want this hand to end, go all-in, get called by KQo limper and run out (or crippled, or whatever) on a river K or Q.

OK, so bad beats happen to all of us, and we all have many worse tales to tell (e.g., bottom-pair + top-kicker calling our top-two-pair and hitting trips). I got my money in with the best of it, so I leave the tournament feeling at least somewhat good. The alternative is to bet somewhat less aggressively and get out of the way when the rabbit comes back at you after making a river. That can't be better... can it?

I got to thinking. If you're in a large multiplayer low-limit tournament, can you really hope to survive the innumerable bad beat artists who are shooting at you? Let's say that you keep putting in big bets with a large (e.g., 3:1) advantage and otherwise play solidly. This seems sensible, yet with a nearly-infinite supply of loose callers, you're gonna get seriously wounded or killed by one of 'em before getting to the money.

That is, while it may be tactically correct to play very hard when ahead, it may not be strategically correct.

Doing some back-of-the-envelope math, let's say that you have ten 3:1 situations over the course of a tournament and otherwise avoid any encounters (or at least have a wash on all others). The probability that you'll survive all ten is (by my meager arithmetic skills) (.75)^10 = 5.6%

That's pretty ugly, given that it only gets you third place in a 3000-player tournament (assuming ten double-ups = 1024). Remember, pretty much 2500 of the 3000 wouldn't know the "Gap Principle" if it bit them on the nose.

Is there a strategic alternative? Maybe you can reduce your payoff, but also increase your chances by making sizeable (but not all-in) bets and pulling back when called or bet-into. That seems weaker, but the math suggests that maybe you'll be more likely to survive with a relatively large stack. It's really a form of insurance.

Suppose you bet only half your stack instead of all-in. If you get a call from a rabbit, so be it. If you win, great. If not, you're alive to fight again. So now you can afford to get hunted once in a while.

Yes, this strategy adjusts later on, as you get closer to the money, but it seems like it might be appropriate during the early "paintball" phase of the tournament, when everyone is shooting at everyone.

Thoughts?