How much of an edge woud the best players fold early?

[Paul Phillips]

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You'll take a 60% advantage, yet you'll fold KK to an early all in.

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Yeah. I assume we're talking about something like blinds are 25-50, I make it 150 out of my 10000, guy moves all-in. I've never seen him before and it's very early. This is an easy fold.

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So pretty much if anyone goes all in early on in a tourney and you have no reads on him, then you think that he has aces 60+% of the time? This seems to not accurately reflect some of the aggression I've seen from the WSOP.

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The problem is that you do not have enough data to perform good bayesian analysis. Obviously if he shows me something other than aces I would call, but the very first time you see someone make a ridiculous all-in overbet, my experience is that you'll do MUCH better over time assuming they have the nuts and folding everything less than the nuts. If they are making a habit of this, you'll know it soon.

Every stage of a tournament is different and as it gets later such dramatic overbets become impossible because the average-stack-to-blind-size ratio shrinks so much. But if I have 200 big blinds, there's no way I'm putting them all in the middle preflop without aces unless I have meaningful evidence my opponent will do it with at least one hand other than aces and kings.

So I suppose in a sense I'm advocating "waiting for a better spot", but not because I am intentionally passing on an edge; rather because I have too little information to assess the edge, and I believe I'll have much better information in the very near future.

I did fold KK preflop in the first hour of the WSOP this year: the one and only time I've done that in a tournament.