[silvershade]

I think part of what is missing here is that there are problems with waiting for good cards that are exacerbated by fast blind levels.

Firstly, the good cards might never actually arrive, this is obviously more likely given shorter blind levels as you will simply have fewer hands before being blinded off.

Secondly, if you wait too long you may not have enough chips left to really extract full value from these cards even if they do arrive. Again this is very obviously more likely to be a problem if the blinds are fast.

Each of these problems is likely to be recurrent, even if you get that first good hand, you only buy a little time before you need the next, in a fast tournament a good hand buys you time to wait on the next but it's less time than it would be in a faster tournament.

It seems reasonable that we should in fact be making adjustments based on these factors that are in fact directly affected by tournament speed. Overall we have less incentive to wait for hands because we will see fewer of them, they are likely worth less to us when they arrive and they do less to solve our problem of staying alive anyway. If the reward for waiting is diminished it seems obvious we should be less inclined to wait.

The obvious adjustment ought to be to broaden our starting hand requirements where the blind levels are fast, beggars cannot be choosers so to speak.