[David Sklansky]

"So while yes there is an important theoretical distinction to be made, practically it his very few applications."

The big application occurs in the early rounds of major tournaments where you are lucky enough to start with an easy table. And the strategy change isn't just avoiding calling an all in bet. Its playing the whole hand (when the alternatives are close) in a way that reduces the likelihood that you will find yourself in that spot. In other words you don't reraise a late position opener in the samll blind with AK suited. Stuff like that.

As far as quantifying how much positive EV you should give up to avoid a confrontation that will bust you, there are many parameters with the most important two being the skill of your opponents and whether you will have lots of chips to work with if you pass the gamble up.

In spite of the above, I agree that the concept isn't important even for great players, and is almost irrelevant for merely good ones. In fact the concept that if your stack falls below a certain threshold you need to gamble is the more important one. When I explined both concepts in the magazine here, Snyder should have seized upon that as vindication for his strategy. Instead the moron chose to write a lengthy fallacious dissertion in an insane attempt to overturn a mathematical/logical principle that I and even Mike Caro had thought about greatly, with the comment "good math, bad logic". Until that occurred I pretty much ignored the subject.