[Dave D]

I've tried to read everyone's posts, and I'm gonna try to throw in my own thoughts on this.

My thesis here is: After the tournament starts, there's no way to know what your expectation is. I think once you make your judgement at the start of the tourney, that's all you have, and obviously that's shaky in itself, here's why I think this:

1. I look at trying to re-evaluate your expectation as analogous to the comment I occasionally see fish make. You're both all in preflop, you have Ak and he has a pair, you hit your A on the river. The fish says "nice river", or "river saved you". We all know this isn't the case, you had 5 chances to hit and you did.

I think this is the same as the situation we're talking about. Before the tournament starts, you somehow made a judgement as to your expectation, which theoretically should have considered every possible outcome. On avg, you expect to be up x amount. Doubling up in the first hand should have already been considered as one of these. You can't make any sort of new judgements, because you already have. I think you're basically being results oriented when you start trying to re-evaluate your expectation.

So basically what I'm saying is, this specific outcome doesn't matter.

2. I like the Golf analogy. However, I'd like to make a football analogy. Similar, but a little distinct, and a little more extreme, and therefore I think fits better.

Pretty much any football game, the halftime score isn't that important most of the time. That is, if you tell me USC is beating Bama by 7-0 at halftime, you're basically telling me *nothing* about the outcome. I'd say this is probably going to be the case up to around a 17 point difference. Witness UT coming back against LSU this year, and UT has had a horrible season.

So, what I'm saying is, doubling up early on is pretty useless. I mean, it's nice, it feels good, but ultimatly, in the grand scheme of information that you're talking about, it's really not important, at all. Anything could happen, the next hand you could lose with AA against AK AI PF. You could get moved to a table with all pros and be at the ONE table without bad players.

If say in the first 5 hands you have doubled up each time, yeah, then it starts to matter. But until you can really say you have a *dominating* chip stack, I dont think your expectation changes significantly. Having twice everyone else's stack just isn't that big a deal. Things will be evened out in an hour.

3. Furthermore, I think expectation calculations are pretty much useless. As they say in commercials for mutual funds, past performance does not indicate future success. but nevermind that, even if your ROI is a certain number of a lot of tournaments, I just view it as useless to try to calculate expectation. You play the best game you can and hope to do well.