How You Are Eliminated: What Does It Say?

[DWarrior]

I think for me it's mostly lost bets on previous rounds. For example, going broke on QQ vs AKo. Some may blow this off as just a coinflip and hope for a better day, but I look at the mistakes I made previously. Say I have 2k and average is 3k, now I'm flipping a coin to get 4k or bust, but if I lost 200 in chips to lost opportunities, that flip should have been between 4.4k or bust instead, so every mistake I make in early rounds I usually view as at least double that loss because I'll usually have to survive a flip or worse at some point in the tournament. It used to be that a flip for me would mean the difference between getting to the average or going broke, but the recent bustouts I've had were flips that were the difference between becoming one of the chip leaders or going broke, so it's obvious that I'm on the right track.

Also, lost bets may be the reason why you go broke at times. Say you lost 500 to stupid plays and lost bets early on, and you survive a coin flip and a favorable all-in and now you're at 8k, when you should have been at 10k. Then you go broke with KK vs AA to a guy who has 9k in chips. Well, those extra 500 chips would have left you with 1k now, not a lot, but still a fighting chance.

The hands I get eliminated or crippled on will generally be either a lost flip, KK vs AA-type hands, or a failed bluff/semibluff. The real problem for me are the lost bets and misplays on previous hands that lead me to the final hand so what I do now is try and remember a hand in a tournament that I misplayed that would have lead me to be in a more favorable spot in a tournament. I want to make it so that when I have to really gamble, winning will put me in a signifficantly more favorable position and not just bail me out until the next big hand.

Maybe for someone like Phil Ivey, who makes a lot less mistakes, the final hand matters more, but I definitely make a ton of mistakes in other hands to make the last hand no different than the others.